Maria Gkoutziomitrou is a PhD candidate in English Linguistics at the 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 Radboud University of Nijmegen, the Netherlands. 

In 2022, she completed the MA in English Linguistics: New Applications and International Communication at the Complutense University of Madrid, receiving a distinction for her MA dissertation, supervised by Dr. Begoña Núñez Perucha. The dissertation examined the representation of social actors in the digital discourse of male survivors of sexual violence.

Maria currently holds a predoctoral research contract (FPI), funded by the Spanish State Research Agency (AEI) and the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, and associated with the research project “Evidentiality, Perspectivisation and Subjectivisation at the Interfaces of Language – II” (EPSIL2) (PID2023-148755NB-I00). Her PhD thesis is supervised by Dr. Aoife Ahern (Faculty of Education, UCM) and focuses on language attitudes, ideologies, and stance-taking towards English language variation in higher education. Her research interests include sociolinguistics, (critical) discourse analysis, and applied linguistics.

Her teaching experience (2024–2026) at the Department of English Studies (UCM) includes lectures in the undergraduate courses ‘English Semantics’, ‘Varieties of English’ and ‘Research Methodology in English Linguistics’. In addition, she has been a member of two UCM teaching innovation projects exploring English language and linguistics students’ and lecturers’ attitudes towards linguistic diversity in higher education contexts (INNOVA-464, 2024–2025; and INNOVA-46, 2026–2027).

As part of her academic training, she has attended numerous courses and seminars and participated in three international summer schools: the Braga Summer School in Linguistics 2023 (Braga, Portugal), the LOT Summer School 2025 (Antwerp, Belgium), and the CSLS Summer School 2026: De/Valuing Language (Bern, Switzerland). She has also presented her research at several international conferences, including IDEOLING2 (2026), UPCEL (2026), AJL (2025), DISGEN1 (2022), and LingBaW (2022).

Additionally, she has published the following works:

• Pettersson–Traba, D., Gkoutziomitrou, M., & Tamaredo, I. (2026). Language Variation in the Linguistics Classroom: Improving University Students’ Attitudes through Targeted Instruction. Journal of English Studies, 24, 267–303. https://doi.org/10.18172/jes.6883 
• Gkoutziomitrou, M. (2025). Gladis Massini–Gagliari, Rosane Andrade Berlinck, & Angelica Rodrigues (Eds.), Understanding linguistic prejudice: Critical approaches to language diversity in Brazil. Cham: Springer, 2023. Pp. xx, 202. Hb. €130. Language in Society, 54(3), 597–599. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404524000952
• Gkoutziomitrou, M. (2024). The representation of social actors in male survivors' digitally–recounted experiences of sexual violence. In S. Maruenda, L. Mercé & E. Castellano–Ortolà (Eds.), Discourse, gender, and violence: Insights from news and social media texts (pp. 209–235). Peter Lang Verlag.

Maria is part of the STAM-Lab Team, the student committee of the PhD programme in English Linguistics, which organizes activities for the PhD community. She also serves as a student representative on the Department of English Studies Council (UCM).

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

Links: ORCID; Google Scholar; LinkedIn