Team

I’m a husband and dad who spends his weekends cheering on his three children in sports or hiking in the Alps with the family. The latter is just one reason why I still live in Tübingen (in southern Germany), albeit holding a tenure-track professorship in New Testament Studies at the University of Bonn since 2021. My interest in cognitive science and postclassical narratology goes back to the beginning of my dissertation, in which I attempted to map how the (ancient) reader constructs a mental image of Jesus in the course of Mark’s narrative. Apparently, this attempt was not so bad, as the work was awarded both the Manfred Lautenschlaeger Award and the Armin Schmitt Prize. More recently, I have expanded my interest to the cognition of characters in general, and have become even more passionate about the interaction between ancient narratives and urban contexts.

I am American by birth but British by adoption, as I’ve taught at the University of St Andrews in Scotland for 10 years. My interest in cognitive disciplines goes back to my work on my dissertation at Emory University, for which I used cognitive metaphor theory to help me think about the use of apocalyptic symbols in the Gospel of Mark. Since then, I have expanded my interests to look at how cognitive disciplines can help us think about the genre of the Gospels, about how we make sense of narrative texts, and about how we identify with characters. When I am not pursuing these interests, I try to connect with my boys who are pursuing courses at the university of Edinburgh. With my husband, Todd, I also enjoy (classical) music, cooking, and walking.

I started loving pragmatics when I studied deixis in Pindar’s poetry. Later I have delved into the pragmatics of anaphoric markers, on Herbert Clark’s model of ‘layering’ applied to the Odyssey, and on discourse particles, especially in Herodotus and Thucydides. In more recent years I started exploring cognitive concepts and frameworks (compression, image schemas, and viewpoint) in Ancient Greek as well as in modern English corpora. My core interests include the performative side of oral traditions and the multimodality of storytelling. Before I started a full-time academic path, I have been a classical piano teacher in a music school for 12 years.

I was born and grew up in Shettleston in Glasgow’s East End and studied Greek and Humanity (Latin) for my MA at the University of Glasgow, going on also to do a PhD there on the ancient Greek concept of aidôs (shame/respect). After working in Germany, New Zealand, and England, as well as in all three of Scotland’s surviving Classics departments, I now hold the Chair of Classics in the University of Edinburgh. I’ve been interested in the emotions since my PhD days and my current interests in cognitive and affective science grew out of that. I’m especially interested in narrative concepts of mind and emotion, narrative approaches to other-understanding, and the presentation of mind and emotion in narrative. When not researching or writing, I take my mind off the misery of being a minor functionary in a vast totalitarian bureaucracy by playing double bass in Scotland’s number one bluegrass band, Longway.

I was lucky enough to grow up in Germany and Belgium as well as my native Dublin, before studying for a BA in Greek and Philosophy at Trinity College Dublin. I then moved across the Irish Sea for an MSt in Ancient Philosophy at Oxford and a PhD in Classics at Cambridge. After two years of tutoring in London, I moved up to Edinburgh for a postdoc at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, and in 2017 I took up the position of Lecturer in Greek Literature at the University of St Andrews. I am close to competing a monograph (based on my PhD) that examines metaphor in Aeschylus through the lens of cognitive linguistics, and my next project wil be an investigation of the poetic persona in Pindar’s epinicians, again with the help of cognitive linguistics. In my spare time I enjoy hiking, harping and harrumphing.

I’m based at the University of Freiburg in the south of Germany, where I teach medieval English literature and culture and currently run the Centre for Medieval Studies. I’ve been interested in cognitive literary studies and cognitive narrative theory since working on my PhD on medieval saints’ legends (The Scottish Legendary: Towards a Poetics of Hagiographic Narration, Manchester UP 2016). From 2017 to 2022, I was the PI of an ERC Starting Grant project called “Lists in Literature and Culture”, which took a cognitive approach to list-making and forms of enumerations across literary history. I’m still fascinating by lists of all kinds. Also, I take a great interest in the reception of ancient texts in the Middle Ages, in retellings and medievalism, and in contemporary literature.

I am the Portland Chair in New Testament Studies at the University of Gloucestershire in Cheltenham, a position I had held since September 2013. Prior to that I held positions at the University of St Andrews (1992-2010), with four years’ leave (2005-2009) to serve as Chief Executive of the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and at St Mary’s University College Twickenham (Principal and Professor of Biblical Interpretation), from 2010-2013. Before becoming an academic I was a litigation solicitor and then barrister for eleven years in Sydney, Australia. I specialise in the social-scientific interpretation of biblical and extra-biblical texts and ancient Judean legal papyri, and have additional interests in the Bible and art and New Testament Theology. I have undergraduate degrees in arts and law and a masters degree in law from the University of Sydney and a D. Phil and DD from the University of Oxford. I am a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. My most recent book is 2 Corinthians: A Social Identity Commentary. T & T Clark Social Identity Commentaries on the New Testament (London: T & T Clark Bloomsbury, 2021).

I’m an independent scholar with a Ph.D. in social ethics and biblical studies from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley (2003). I like thinking about how our reading habits shape our social ethics and common life. To maintain a semblance of sanity during the Covid era, I am learning to craft sourdough bread and practice Qi Gong. What makes me happiest is staying in touch with my sons and their wives, and my two fine grandsons.

I was born in Greece and spent my summers in ancient Olympia, which certainly fuelled my interest in all things ancient! I studied Archaeology and Art History at the University of Athens, Greece, before I moved to Scotland to pursue an MLitt (Late Medieval and Renaissance Italian Art) from St Andrews, where I also completed my PhD in 2009. I have worked as a Neil Macgregor scholar at the National Gallery, London, doing research for the National Inventory Research Project, and have participated in archaeological excavations in Greece. I am currently a Lecturer at the School of Art History, University of St Andrews. My main research interests are centred on classical reception, women travellers and history of archaeology. I have published various articles on late medieval Italo-Byzantine artistic contacts, and edited a collection of essays on The Legacy of Antiquity New Perspectives in the Reception of the Classical World (2013). I have recently been delving into the cognitive science as a way to approach late medieval religious art and narrative.

I am a Senior Lecturer in Hebrew Bible / Old Testament at University of St Andrews’ School of Divinity, where I teach Hebrew, ancient Israelite literature, and textual criticism. I have a PhD in Hebrew and Semitic Languages from University of Wisconsin-Madison, and my side interests include music, good food, and walking in the mountains.

While living, studying, and working in Germany (Hamburg & Tübingen), Ireland (Dublin), and the U.S. (at a research institute in the New Mexican desert), I have acquired a background and degrees in Philosophy, Linguistics, (German and Comparative) Literature, as well as Cognitive Science. In 2018 I cofounded the ‘Powerful Literary Fiction Texts Network’ to bring together scholars from these and related disciplines to study the impact of fiction reading from an interdisciplinary angle. This collaboration so far resulted in two international conferences and the open-access anthology Powerful Prose. How Textual Features Impact Readers (transcript Verlag, 2021). Currently, I’m researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics (Frankfurt am Main, Germany) studying the effects that fictional refugee short stories have on (real) readers’ stereotypic expectancies regarding refugees, their own portrayal of these individuals, and their cognitive engagement in problem solving when it comes to this groups’ troubles. I use experimental methods and implicit measurements to find out whether fiction reading can genuinely have these effects, whether these effects are short- or long-term, and whether reader characteristics influence the effects’ emergence and strength. Apart from research I enjoy poetry, parentheses, and being with people who do not take themselves too seriously either. Also: jazz, cake, and scuba-diving.

I am a New Testament scholar working on the Fourth Gospel with a particular emphasis in the intersection of theology and psychology. Previously I have worked in personal and social identity and memory research, and in computational linguistics. Trained in Psychology at ANU I naturally bring a Social Identity (Tajfel & Turner, et al) framework to the consideration of the biblical text and theology. Broadly I have an interest in the science informed theology and Christian identity. Currently I am working on an extended project focused on socio-scientific approaches to religious enmity, an introduction to Social Identity Theory; a reception history of the Christology of the Fourth Gospel and its use in social discourse; and narrative identity construction and Christian formation. I live in Melbourne, Australia, with my wife and three boys, and entirely too many hobbies.

I am Professor and chair of English Literature at RWTH Aachen University, and co-founder of the Aachen Center for Cognitive and Empirical Literary Studies (ACCELS). I have been fascinated by how reading printed works on a page can give us the feeling of being close to other human beings for a long time. The question of how literary characters tap into, and very likely enhance, our extremely complex cognitive-emotional abilities to engage with others is a question that interests me just as much as how human beings relate to each other in real life.

I am a graduate of the Hebrew University (BA and MA) in Jerusalem where I studied Talmud. I wrote my dissertation at Yale and my post doc at Harvard. But still sit on the Yale side of the Yale-Harvard football game. I have been teaching at Ben Gurion University since coming back from the US, in the Jewish Thought department. In my research I study Jewish-Christian literary references in the Babylonian Talmud. This had lead me to think about CL when asking what are the processes that the ancient reader went through when reading these texts. Questions such as: What did a Jew living in the fifth century think when hearing a story mocking Jesus? And how such questions can shed light on the historical questions of Jewish-Christian relations in late antiquity.

I’m a cognitive linguist with core interests in metaphor, constructions, frame semantics and poetics. I got pulled into work on Biblical texts by insightful doctoral students who kept on looking at Biblical metaphors and frames; I ended up drawn to work on Moral Accounting metaphors in Matthew, and gendered reference to the Divine. A current work focus is textual viewpoint maintenance, including all the more implicit ways that that happens within the narrow channel of writing. My chemist husband and I are Great Lakes kids, now living in Berkeley, California, and very grateful for the magnolia tree that umbrella’s our back yard.

I am a Professor of Classics at Ghent University, Belgium, where I direct the Novel Saints: Ancient Fiction and Hagiography Research Centre. I am the author of Crafting Characters: Heroes and Heroines in the Ancient Greek Novel (OUP 2014), editor of the Oxford Handbook of Ancient Biography (OUP 2020), and a co-editor of Writing Biography in Greece and Rome: Narrative Technique and Fictionalization (CUP 2016, with K. Demoen) and Characterization in Ancient Greek Literature (Brill 2018, with E. van Emde Boas). I was the Laureate of the Prize for Humanities of the Belgian Royal Academy (2017) and the recipient of a Francqui Foundation Fellowship of the Belgian American Educational Foundation (2006), the Triennial Prize of the Flemish Academic Foundation (2008) and two European Research Council grants (2013, 2018). Fr more information visit my personal website: https://research.flw.ugent.be/en/koen.detemmerman).

I became permanently focused on the study of the human mind early in my youth, a couple of decades before the phrase “cognitive science” was invented, I tell that story in “Signs of Intelligent Life” (2007). At present, I serve as Institute Professor and Professor of Cognitive Science at Case Western Reserve University. I co-direct the International Distributed Little Red Hen Lab, which is dedicated to theory of multimodal communication, to the development of computational, statistical, and technical tools for studying multimodal communication, and to pedagogy of multimodal communication. I lead, fund, or participate in many research programs in cognitive science, on all continents but one (if you host a conference in Antarctica, it would be cool if you would invite me to speak!), and publish individually and with teams. The details, including publications for download, descriptions of projects, recordings of talks, and introductions to my networks are available on my website. I tweet breaking news as @turnermarkb.

I live with my family in Aarhus, Denmark, where I am Associate Professor in Classical Philology. My academic interests revolve around linguistic, cognitive and narratological approaches to ancient Greek literature. In my free time, when not running around after my daughters, I love to cook (and eat), run, listen to movie soundtracks, and binge-watch tv shows with my wife. I’m trying to get better at Danish.

I was born and raised in Dallas, Texas, USA and studied Community Health at Texas A&M Univesity and ancient Christianity at Baylor University. After adjuncting for four years, I joined the Baylor Interdisciplinary Core as a Lecturer (promotion track) where I teach courses on rhetoric, intersectionality, and interfaith cooperation. My interest in cogn​​itive approaches stems from my graduate work on characterization in Mark’s gospel (published by Brill as Hearing Kyriotic Sonship) and my subsequent book on complex characterization (published by Bloomsbury as Configuring Nicodemus). What began as a search for how we create meaning has developed into questions about framing, blending, polysemy, and emotional response to narrative among ancient and contemporary readers. I am equally interested in the value of such sciences of the mind for informing our approaches to teaching and learning. When I am not teaching or writing, I enjoy restoring acoustic guitars and running, though not usually at the same time. My partner, Rachel, and I are the proud parents of two lovely, bright, and strong children.

I was born in northern Germany but grew up in the area between Cologne and Bonn, Germany's former capital. I went on to study Ancient Greek, Latin and Byzantine Greek at Bonn, Frankfurt, and Pisa. After graduating from Bonn University I also did my Ph.D. there on Language, History and Identity in the works of the Greek literary critic and historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus (1st cent. BCE). After a post-doc in the U.S. (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), I joined the School of Classics at St Andrews in 2011, where I am now a Senior Lecturer. Romans writing under and about Roman rule have continued to fascinate me, and I have never stopped working on Dionysius, Polybius and other Greek writers, mostly historians, of the Hellenistic and early imperial period (roughly the 3rd through 1st centuries BCE). I admit, thought, that Classical Hebrew is becoming an ever more important part of my life. My current book project is an intellectual and cultural history of the debate about Hannibal's march, one of the most famous legacies of the Hellenistic period, from Polybius to the 21st century. Approaches that have been most influential on my work include the New Historicism, intellectual history, cognitive approaches to narrative and, most recently, ecocriticsm. In my free time, I like to roam through the Scottish hills and countryside or listen to classical music, preferably on vinyl.