Professor Jane Setter 

National Teaching Fellow of Advance HE and Senior Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy, Jane is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, member of the Council of the International Phonetic Association (IPA), secretary of the IPA Permanent Council for the Organisation of the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences and of the Association of National Teaching Fellows, and on the advisory panel of Babel: The Language Magazine, to which she contributes the regular column “Giving Voice A Voice”. She is a contributor to the University College London Summer Course in English Phonetics and has acted as an examiner for the IPA Certificate of Proficiency in the Phonetics of English. She is also a trustee of the English Speaking Union, a charity which supports young people to build speaking and listening skills.

Jane is School Director of Academic Tutoring and Departmental Undergraduate Admissions and Recruitment Officer. Her outreach activities include visiting schools to give talks to students and organising and teaching on our INSET course for teachers of A level English Language. She has also run refresher courses in Grammar and Phonetics for Speech and Language Therapists with colleagues in the School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences.

Jane is probably best known as co-editor of the eighteenth edition of the Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary (CUP, 2011), for her popular science book Your Voice Speaks Volumes: It’s not what you say but how you say it (OUP, 2019), for the Cambridge Handbook of Phonetics (CUP, 2021) and, most recently, for the Oxford Handbook of Language and Prejudice (OUP, 2025). Her main research interests are English phonetics and phonology, English pronunciation and intelligibility (including in World and learner Englishes), phonology in atypical speech populations (specifically Williams syndrome), and phonetics and phonology in Hong Kong English; her particular interest is in prosodic aspects of speech such as rhythm and intonation. She has held UK and international research grants and published widely, and is a popular keynote speaker, both at home and abroad.

Jane also works on aspects of teaching and learning in Higher Education, both in phonetics/phonology and in other aspects of quality assurance and quality enhancement, including working with students as partners in the curriculum, supporting first generation students, and on aspects of student employability. She has acted as external examiner and on periodic review panels for universities in the UK and internationally and collaborates with colleagues worldwide on aspects of teaching and learning.