MARÍA BELÉN ALVARADO ORTEGA is a Professor of Spanish Language at the University of Alicante. She has served as a visiting professor at Rutgers University, USA; Cork, Ireland; Roehampton, United Kingdom; Paris III, France; Lisbon, Portugal; Viterbo, Italy; and Brussels, Belgium, among others. She teaches undergraduate and postgraduate courses, including Spanish for Tourism and Leisure on the Master’s Degree in Spanish and English for Specific Purposes offered by IULMA (Interuniversity Institute for Applied Modern Languages). Since 2013, she has supervised and participated as a panel member in over 25 undergraduate and Master’s theses. She co-supervised, alongside Dr Ruiz Gurillo, the PhD thesis of Laura M. Aliaga Aguza, which was defended in January 2020.

As principal investigator, she has led two research projects: “Language and Gender” (2013–2015) and “The Gender Variable in Humorous Texts in Spanish and English” (2015–2017). Additionally, since 2002, she has been a researcher in the GRIALE group, contributing to over 70 publications, including Dime cómo ironizas y te diré quién eres: una aproximación pragmática a la ironía (“Tell Me How You Use Irony and I'll Tell You Who You Are: A Pragmatic Approach to Irony”), edited by L. Ruiz and X. Padilla (2009, Peter Lang), a work that has become a reference manual on irony in Spanish. She has also authored the monograph Las fórmulas rutinarias del español: Teoría y aplicaciones (“Routine Formulas in Spanish: Theory and Applications”, 2010, Peter Lang) and co-edited Irony and Humor: From Pragmatics to Discourse (2013, Amsterdam, John Benjamins) with Leonor Ruiz Gurillo.

Currently, she is the editor-in-chief of the journal ELUA and is listed among the most cited researchers in Spain’s CSIC database.