María Martínez Lirola is a Senior Lecturer of the Department of English at the University of Alicante, Spain and Research Fellow at the University of South Africa (UNISA). Her main areas of research are Critical Discourse Analysis, Systemic Functional Linguistics and Applied Linguistics. She has published extensively in international journals such as Discourse and Society, Critical Discourse Studies, Social Semiotics, Visual Communication, Signos, RESLA, etc. She has also published seven books and several books chapters in publishers such as Peter Lang, Cambridge Scholars Publishers, John Benjamins and Comares, among others. Dr. Martínez Lirola is the director of the research group “Critical Analysis of Multimodal Discourse” from 2010. She has been a visiting scholar in different universities all over the world.