Maria is a PhD candidate in English Linguistics at Complutense University of Madrid (UCM). She holds a BA in English Language and Literature from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece (2018). During her undergraduate studies, she was awarded an Erasmus+ Studies scholarship, through which she spent a semester (Spring 2015-2016) at the Radboud University of Nijmegen, the Netherlands.

In 2022, she completed the MA in English Linguistics: New Applications and International Communication at Complutense University of Madrid (with Distinction in her final thesis). Her MA dissertation, supervised by Dr. Begoña Núñez Perucha, examined the representation of social actors in the digital discourse of male survivors of sexual violence.

Before starting her PhD, she worked as an EFL teacher for five years and also participated in various translation and subtitling projects.

Maria currently holds an FPI predoctoral research fellowship (contrato predoctoral FPI), granted by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation. This fellowship is associated with the research project “Experimental Techniques in Sociolinguistic Research: Methodological Effects in the Study of Language Attitudes (SOCRATTEX)” (PID2021-127101NB-I00). She is collaborating with this project as a research assistant while working on her PhD thesis, supervised by the project’s PI, Dr. Gitte Kristiansen, which focuses on experimental methods in the area of cognitive sociolinguistics, specifically language attitudes. Her main research interests include sociolinguistics, cognitive linguistics, and critical discourse analysis.

As part of her academic process, she has attended several international conferences and presented her work at the following two:

• (July 2023). “A sociolinguistic investigation of the perception of language varieties based on nativeness and gender: Multiple multilingual matched-guise experiments”, Braga Summer School in Linguistics, Universidad Católica Portuguesa. 
• (October 2022). “The representation of social actors in male survivors' digitally-recounted experiences of sexual violence”, 1st International Seminar on Gender and Discourse: Discourses of Gendered Violence (DISGEN1), University of Valencia (UV). 

Maria is also a member of STAM-Lab, the student committee of the PhD programme, which organises activities for the PhD community.

For any further questions, please feel free to get in touch via mgkoutzi@ucm.es.