Douglas Mark Ponton is Associate Professor of English Language and Translation at the Department of Political and Social Sciences, University of Catania. His research interests include political discourse analysis, ecolinguistics, interactive sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, pragmatics, corpus linguistics, and critical discourse studies; he is also a keen amateur musician. Ponton's main publications are For Arguments' Sake: Speaker Evaluation in Modern Political Discourse, and Meaning Politics: A Manual of Political Discourse Analysis. As well as politics, his research deals with a variety of social topics, including tourism, the discourse of mediation, ecology, local dialect and folk traditions, including proverbs and Blues music. He has also published a paper on the figure of the bandit in popular song, exploring the lyrics of Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie.