John Robert Edwards


John Robert Edwards received a PhD from McGill University in 1974.  After working as a Research Fellow at the Educational Research Centre in Dublin, he moved to Nova Scotia and joined the Psychology Department at St Francis Xavier University, where he is now Professor Emeritus and a Senior Research Professor. He is also an adjunct professor at Dalhousie University in Halifax. He has been a Visiting Lecturer at many universities, and a visiting professor in England, Ireland and China. He is an Honorary Professor at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Edwards is a fellow of the British Psychological Society, the Canadian Psychological Association, and the Royal Society of Canada.
His main research interest is with the establishment, maintenance and continuity of group identity, with particular reference to language in both its communicative and symbolic aspects.  He has lectured and presented papers on this topic in some thirty countries, and his work has been translated into half-a-dozen languages. He is the author of a dozen books, and editor of five. He has also written some 300 articles, chapters and reviews.
Edwards is or has been an editorial-board member for about twenty international language journals and several book series. He was the Editor of the Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development for twenty-five years, and remains as Reviews Editor. He was for twenty years the Editor of the Multilingual Matters book series for the Bristol publisher of the same name, a series that now comprises more than 150 titles; he is now the co-editor of the series.  He is a member of half-a-dozen scholarly societies devoted to language, nationalism and their ramifications.
For a decade, he was the Chair of the Canadian Ethnic Studies Advisory Committee, a panel within the Department of Multiculturalism & Citizenship that assessed applications for research grants, research fellowships and the establishment of university chairs.
Edwards was given the St Francis University President’s Research Award and its University Research Award. In 2012 he received the Gardner Award for research in bilingualism from the ''International Association of Language and Social Psychology.''

Selected works

  • Edwards, J..   Language and Disadvantage.  London: Edward Arnold /  New York: Elsevier-North Holland.
  • Edwards, J. .  The Social Psychology of Reading.  Silver Spring, Maryland: Institute of Modern Languages.
  • Edwards, J..  The Irish Language:  An Annotated Bibliography of Sociolinguistic Publications, 1772-1982.  New York: Garland.
  • Edwards, J. .  Linguistic Minorities, Policies and Pluralism.  London & New   York:  Academic Press.
  • Edwards, J..  Language, Society and Identity.  Oxford:  Basil Blackwell.
  • Edwards, J..  Multilingualism.  London: Routledge.
  • Edwards, J. . Language in Canada.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Edwards, J..  Un món de llengües / Un mundo de lenguas. Barcelona: Editorial Aresta.
  • Edwards, J..  Language and Identity.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Edwards, J..  Language Diversity in the Classroom. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
  • Edwards, J.. Minority Languages and Group Identity: Cases and Categories.   Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 
  • Edwards, J.. Challenges in the Social Life of Language.  London: Palgrave Macmillan. 
  • Edwards J.. Multilingualism: Understanding Linguistic Diversity.  London and New York: Continuum / Bloomsbury.
  • Edwards, J..  Sociolinguistics: A Very Short Introduction.  New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Edwards, J..  The Irish Language:  An Annotated Bibliography of Sociolinguistic Publications, 1772-1982.  London and New York: Routledge.
  • Edwards, J.. Multilingualism: Understanding Linguistic Diversity.. London and New York: Bloomsbury.

    General references

  • Edwards, John Robert.
  • Edwards, John .
Category:1947 births
Category:Academic staff of St. Francis Xavier University
Category:University of Western Ontario alumni
Category:McGill University Faculty of Science alumni
Category:Fellows of the Royal Society of Canada
Category:Canadian psychologists
Category:Living people