john malcolm swales1 born 1938 is a linguist best known for his work on genre analysis particularly with regard to its application to the fields of rhetoric discourse analysis english for academic purposes and more recently information sciencehe was born in 1938 in surrey uk and attended various private schools before going up to cambridge university in 1957 graduating with a degree in psychology he first taught in southern italy for two years both in a high school and at the local university and then went to sweden for a year as an english language teacher his next move was as an assistant lecturer at the university of libya from 196365 after a year studying for an advanced diploma in linguistics and english language teaching at the university of leeds uk he returned to libya as head of the english section at the college of engineering in tripoli after three more years at the leeds institute of education he returned to the middle east this time to the prestigious university of khartoum sudan where he was director of the english language servicing unit from 19731978 he returned to the uk in 1978 as a senior lecturer later reader in the language studies unit at the university of aston where he jointly developed the first masters course in the teaching of english for specific purposesin 1985 he moved to the university of michigan on a visiting position and in 1987 was appointed professor of linguistics and director of the english language institute from 1985 to 2001 he retired in 2007 but remains professor emeritus of linguistics and an active scholar his writing on topics such as the concept of discourse community the relating of descriptive linguistic research to pedagogical uptake and the design of materials for advanced learners of english has been influential in many countries around the world in particular his analysis of research article introductions known as the cars model short for creating a research space has been widely adopted and extended in more recent years john swales has been closely involved with two corpus projects at the english language institute at the university of michigan micase the michigan corpus of academic spoken english and micusp the michigan corpus of upper level student papersoverall he has written or cowritten fifteen books and about 120 research articles or book chapters he continues to be frequently invited to be a keynote speaker at conferences around the world a partial list of his booklength publications followsselected published booksepisodes in esp oxford pergamon press 1985genre analysis english in academic and research settings cambridge 1990other floors other voices a textography of a small university building erlbaum 1998english in todays research world a writing guide with c b feak university of michigan press 2000academic writing for graduate students 2nd ed with c b feak michigan 2004research genres explorations and applications cambridge 2004telling a research story writing a literature review with c b feak michigan 2009abstracts and the writing of abstracts with c b feak michigan 2009incidents in an educational life a memoir of sorts michigan 2009