The ninth webinar on Forensic Linguistics organized by the Department of English held on April 27, 2021 via Zoom featured James R. Fitzgerald, a retired Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent. He also gained fame for his role in the longest and most expensive FBI undertaking, the “University and Airline Bomber (Unabomber) Investigation.”
Attended by more than 600 participants from 24 countries via Zoom and streamed via the Department’s Facebook Page, Fitzgeraled delivered a lecture on “Forensic Linguistics and Authorial Attribution Analysis: From Unabomb to Three Staged Suicide Cases.”
The Unabomber hunter shared his originally coined terms and past experiences as a forensic linguist and criminal profiler on cases that he was part of. He also highlighted three suicide cases that involved suicide emails and notes wherein he used forensic linguistic analysis on sample written texts both from the victim and the suspect to identify authorship attribution leading to the capture of the perpetrators.
Fitzgerald was the consulting producer in the Discovery Channel’s miniseries titled Manhunt: Unabomber that premiered in 2017.
UST Department of English Chair Dr. Rachelle B. Lintao moderated the event.