Ellen Barton is Professor of English and Linguistics at Wayne State University. She received her PhD in Linguistics from Northwestern University in 1985, and has been awarded fellowships from the Centre for Health Communication Research, Cardiff University (2006); the Cancer, Culture, and Literacy Institute, University of South Florida (2003); and the Institute for Human Values in Medicine, Medical University of South Carolina (2000). In 2015-16 she was appointed Professor-in-Residence at the Karmanos Cancer Institute, Wayne State University. Her research interests are in medical communication, medical rhetoric, and ethics/bioethics, using discourse analysis to analyze face-to-face communication in ethically-charged encounters and events in health and medicine.
She has worked as a linguist on interdisciplinary research teams, analyzing offers to participate in cancer clinical trials, information-seeking and information-giving in medical oncology treatment discussions, motivational interviewing as an intervention for pediatric obesity, the use of telemedicine for depression care, and the complexities of end-of-life care and communication. Her work has appeared in Communication & Medicine, Health Expectations, Patient Education and Counseling, Qualitative Health Research, Written Communication, and the Journal of Business and Technical Communication, and in edited collections, including The Handbook of Language and Health Communication (Routledge, 2014) and The Handbook of Communication in Organizations and Professions (de Gruyter, 2011). Her current project is drawn from a year-long observational study of the discourse of ethical deliberation on a Behavioral Institutional Review Board. Her email address is ellen.barton@wayne.edu.