Prof. Peter Torres, a young man with dark hair and close-trimmed beard wearing a plum colored suit and white shirt

This is a collection of published research by applied sociolinguist Peter Joseph Torres, assistant professor of Linguistics and Applied Linguistics within the Department of English. Torres's research merges qualitative and quantitative methodologies to examine written and spoken discourses concerning health issues, from policy documents to doctor-patient interactions. His most recent work centers on the opioid crisis and how policymakers strategically use language to formulate increasingly stringent opioid-related policies, by patients to articulate the complexities of their chronic pain symptoms, and by physicians to implement restrictive policies that could incite conflict with patients.