Elliott M. Hoey is an assistant professor at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Language and Communication Group. He received his PhD in 2017 from Radboud University Nijmegen in conjunction with the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. Prior to coming to the VU, he conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Basel under a Rubicon grant from the NWO (2018-20) and was a Fulbright Scholar at Loughborough University, School of Social Sciences (2021).
In his research he studies human sociality at the point of its production primarily relying on methods and principles from Conversation Analysis. His work has covered a broad range of settings (palliative care, construction work, children’s science lessons), topics (conversational openings, grammatical constructions, third party involvement), and phenomena (sighing, drinking, silence).
In addition to publishing dozens of scientific articles and book chapters, Elliott wrote the first major treatment of lapses in his monograph When Conversation Lapses: The Public Accountability of Silent Copresence (Oxford University Press, 2020) and is a co-editor (with Alexandra Gubina and Chase Wesley Raymond) of a major encyclopedic work The Encyclopedia of Terminology for Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics.
In 2023, Elliott received the Best Paper Award from the International Society for Conversation Analysis for his article “Waiting to inhale: On the placement of sniffing in conversation” (2020, Research on Language in Social Interaction), which was described as “one of the papers that lives up to Conversation Analysis’ maybe most valuable and most risky claim, namely, to be a discovering science”.
In collaboration with Uwe-Alexander Küttner (Leibniz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache), he leads the NWO-funded project “Recording under scrutiny: Dissecting disagreements over recording devices in encounters between police and bystanders” (2023-24). He currently (co)supervises 2 PhD students and coordinates BA/MA theses for the Communication and Information Studies program at the VU Amsterdam.
