John Robert Edwards FRSC (born 3 December 1947, Southampton, England) received a PhD from McGill University in 1974.
After working as a Research Fellow at the Educational Research Centre in Dublin (now part of Dublin City University), he moved to Nova Scotia and joined the Psychology Department at St Francis Xavier University, where he is now Professor Emeritus and a Senior Research Professor.
He is also an adjunct professor (graduate studies) at Dalhousie University in Halifax.
He is an Honorary Professor at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
His main research interest is with the establishment, maintenance and continuity of group identity, with particular reference to language in both its communicative and symbolic aspects.
He has lectured and presented papers on this topic in some thirty countries, and his work has been translated into half-a-dozen languages.
Edwards is or has been an editorial-board member for about twenty international language journals and several book series.
He is a member of half-a-dozen scholarly societies devoted to language, nationalism and their ramifications.
For a decade (1990-1999), he was the Chair of the Canadian Ethnic Studies Advisory Committee, a panel within the Department of Multiculturalism & Citizenship (now the Department of Canadian Heritage) that assessed applications for research grants, research fellowships and the establishment of university chairs.
In 2012 he received the Gardner Award for research in bilingualism from the International Association of Language and Social Psychology.
London: Edward Arnold / New York: Elsevier-North Holland.
Silver Spring, Maryland: Institute of Modern Languages.
The Irish Language: An Annotated Bibliography of Sociolinguistic Publications, 1772-1982.
Minority Languages and Group Identity: Cases and Categories.
The Irish Language: An Annotated Bibliography of Sociolinguistic Publications, 1772-1982.
Edwards, John Robert (biographical entry by W. F. Mackey in the Concise Encyclopedia of Sociolinguistics [Pergamon, 2001]).
Edwards, John (biographical entry by Hans Ladegaard in the Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics [Oxford, 2013]).