Plenary lectures
Elena Cuffari is Assistant Professor of Psychology and Scientific and Philosophical Studies of Mind at Franklin & Marshall College (United States). A philosopher of cognitive science with a background in phenomenology, pragmatism, feminist philosophy, and cognitive linguistics, she has authored and co-authored papers on the enactive approach to language, gesture, metaphor, and narrative pacing. She is co-author of Linguistic Bodies: The Continuity Between Life and Language (2018) with Ezequiel Di Paolo and Hanne De Jaegher. Recent work develops the ethical and political implications of the linguistic bodies framework, with studies on habit and hope in the face of the global climate crisis. She is currently interested in interactions between linguistic bodies and other meaning-making agents, and in increasing participatory possibilities in technology and in research methods.
Hans-Georg Moeller is a Professor at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the University of Macau. He authored numerous books including Profile Yourself: Identity after Authenticity, Genuine Pretending: On the Philosophy of the Zhuangzi (both with Paul D’Ambrosio), The Moral Fool: A Case for Amorality, and The Radical Luhmann (all with Columbia University Press). He is content creator of the YouTube philosophy channels Carefree Wandering and Philosophy in Motion.
Cornelia Müller is Professor of Language Use and Multimodal Communication (European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder)). She works on multimodal forms of language use, focusing on embodied, affective, and dynamic processes of meaning making in gestures and in audio-visual media. She has published on many facets of gesture as a medium of expression and on multimodal metaphor. She has investigated emergent proto-linguistic gestural forms (sedimentation, conventionalization) and developed Methods for Gesture, Film and Metaphor Analysis. With film scholar Hermann Kappelhoff, she has published an interdisciplinary approach to the experiential and affective dynamics of metaphorical meaning in speech, gestures, and audiovisual media.
Jamin Pelkey (PhD, Linguistics, La Trobe University, Melbourne) is Full Professor of Languages, Literatures & Cultures at Toronto Metropolitan University, President of the International Association for Cognitive Semiotics (IACS), President of the International Cognitive Linguistics Association (ICLA), and Co-Editor-in-Chief of Semiotica, journal of the International Association for Semiotic Studies. His research explores issues of embodiment, meaning, and the evolution of language, drawing on insights from semiotics, cognitive linguistics, historical linguistics, linguistic anthropology and years of research on Tibeto-Burman languages and cultures in southwest China. His books include The Semiotics of X, Dialectology as Dialectic, and the four-volume major reference work Bloomsbury Semiotics.
Komarine Romdenh-Romluc works in the Philosophy Department at the University of Sheffield. Most of her research is in the field of phenomenology. She is interested in the ways in which the body is shaped by the socio-cultural environment, and has also written on action and agency. Komarine's current research projects include the philosophy of Frantz Fanon, and the nature of attention.
Morten Tønnessen (born 1976) is a Professor of philosophy at University of Stavanger (Norway). As a biosemiotician and phenomenologist, he has characterized the environmental crisis as an ontological crisis (2003), and developed a notion of "Umwelt transition", an Uexküllian notion of environmental change (2009). Recent works include Semiotic agency: Science beyond mechanism (co-written with Alexei Sharov, 2021), "Anticipating the societal transformation required to solve the environmental crisis in the 21st century" (2021), and "A biosemiotic perspective on the human condition and the environmental crisis" (2023).