Petre Breazu is Assistant Research Professor at the University of Cambridge, Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics and Senior Postdoctoral Researcher at Trinity College, Cambridge. Since obtaining his PhD in Media and Communication (2020) he has pursued an ambitious interdisciplinary research agenda at the intersection of linguistics, media and communication, politics, sociology, and AI. He is recognised as an expert in multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA), Romaphobia and digital racism.
His work has shown how racism is legitimised and normalised across media and digital platforms and has advanced the methodological scope of discourse studies by integrating MCDA with critical race theory and computational approaches. Petre was the Principal Investigator of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie project Romaphobia in the Age of Populism: A Comparative Study of UK and Swedish Media and Political Discourse, and he is currently Co-PI (with Prof. Napoleon Katsos) of the five-year research programme Large Language Models in Humanities and Social Science Research, funded by the Melnik Fund. Petre is the author of 17 peer-reviewed articles, 3 book chapters, and a forthcoming book with Cambridge University Press based on his PhD and MSCA research. He serves as a peer reviewer for leading journals, including Discourse & Society, Discourse & Communication, Ethnicities, Language in Society, and Journal of Language and Politics, among many others.
He is a member of the UKRI Talent Peer Review College (since 2023), regularly evaluating Future Leaders Fellowship proposals and other funding calls. He is also the co-editor of the forthcoming special issue of Discourse Studies, Researching Normalised Hate Speech as Discourse: Tracing Borderline Discourse Logics and Public Sphere Dynamics through a Critical and Interdisciplinary Approach, which brings together leading scholars to examine platform amplification, soft hate speech, mitigation strategies, and AI detection challenges. He has co-organised major international events such as Addressing Hate Speech: Contributions from Sociolinguistics, Media, and AI (2024) and Critical Frontiers in Hate Speech and AI Research (2025) and serves on the Advisory Board for the International Conference on Multimodality. Petre is also a member of the Task Force on Social Concerns of the Archdiocese of Thyateira and Great Britain, where he contributes expertise on migration, modern slavery and social exclusion.