Rate My Professor Maria Stubbe

Professor Maria Stubbe is a Professor in the Department of Primary Health Care and General Practice, University of Otago Wellington, within the Division of Health Sciences. She earned a PhD in Linguistics from Victoria University of Wellington, along with a Diploma in Teaching English as a Second Language (DipTESL) and a New Zealand Diploma in Teaching (NZDipTchg). Her academic career commenced as a Research Fellow and Lecturer at the School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, Victoria University of Wellington, from 1990 to 2003. In 2003, she joined the University of Otago as Associate Professor and progressed to full Professor effective 1 February 2025. She co-directs the interdisciplinary Applied Research on Communication in Health (ARCH) Group and co-leads departmental research initiatives.

Stubbe, a social scientist and applied sociolinguist, specializes in qualitative and mixed-methods research on interactional sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, pragmatics, and health communication. Her work examines real-life primary health care interactions using conversation analysis, including patient-professional consultations, pain displays, interpreter use, culturally diverse patients, and challenging discussions on topics like obesity, diabetes, mental health, respiratory illness, and immunisation. She contributed to establishing the New Zealand Language in the Workplace Project and the Wellington Corpus of Spoken New Zealand English. Notable publications include the book Power and Politeness in the Workplace: A sociolinguistic analysis of talk at work (2nd ed., 2015), 'How to use interpreters in general practice: the development of a New Zealand toolkit' (2012), 'Are research ethics guidelines culturally competent?' (2017), 'The multimodality and temporality of pain displays' (2021), and 'Enhancing effective healthcare communication in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand: Considerations for research, teaching, policy, and practice' (2023). With over 5,700 citations on Google Scholar, her research impacts health services evaluation, intercultural care, and health equity. Stubbe presented her Inaugural Professorial Lecture, 'Talk that Works', in April 2025. Her collaborative efforts on interpreter services earned recognition in the 2021 New Zealand Primary Healthcare Awards.