A forensic linguistic analysis of the
Jack the Ripper letters,
Dr Andrea Nini

We kick off the 2022 FL Seminar Series with an exciting webinar. The invited speaker of the Forensic Linguistics Seminar Series this month is Dr Andrea Nini, senior lecturer in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at the University of Manchester. His talk, titled A forensic linguistic analysis of the Jack the Ripper letters, will be broadcast live on 20 January 2022, at 17:30 (Portuguese time/GMT), via Zoom.

This webinar is part of the monthly Forensic Linguistics research seminars of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Porto and the Forensic/Unit of the Linguistics Centre of the University of Porto. National and international speakers have so far presented their ongoing research into Forensic Linguistics in these seminars, which have been hosted monthly since 2019.

Attendance is free but registration is required. You can register by clicking this link. Once you register you will receive the link to the webinar.

ABSTRACT //
In this talk I will describe the results of an analysis of the Jack the Ripper letters using modern forensic authorship analysis methods. These results support the hypothesis that the two most important earliest letters, Dear Boss and Saucy Jacky, were written by the same person and that a third letter, the highly controversial ‘Moab and Midian’ letter, can also be connected to them. The implications of these results have a wide-ranging impact, from the Jack the Ripper case itself to its socio-cultural dimensions, forensic linguistic methods, and the understanding of other genuine letters from serial killer.

INVITED SPEAKER //
Andrea Nini is a senior lecturer in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at the University of Manchester. His specialisation is the analysis of linguistic data using computational methods and his research interests include forensic linguistics, authorship identification, corpus linguistics, and computational linguistics. In addition to his academic work, Andrea also offers consultancy as a forensic linguist to private clients and law enforcement agencies.