About the Contributors
Katherine Acheson
Session: Personification
Topic: Knowing Nature: Allegory and Its Opposites in 17th-century Aesop's Fables
Katherine Acheson is an Associate Professor in the English department at the University of Waterloo. She is the editor of the diary and memoir of Anne Clifford, and the author of articles on Shakespeare, Milton, and other early modern topics. She is currently working on a book called Visual Rhetoric and Seventeenth-Century English Print Culture, and articles forthcoming on military illustrations, garden design, and Marvell’s poetry; zoological illustrations and their reproduction; and illustrated Aesop’s Fables.
Website
Louise Bishop
Session: Personification
Topic: The Reading Heart from Reginald Pecock to Thomas Elyot
Professor Bishop is a medievalist specializing in fourteenth-century Middle English poetry and prose.
A member of the International Langland Society, she was an invited speaker at the society's conference in 1999,
and presented papers at the Society's third and fourth conferences in Birmingham, England (July 2003) and Philadelphia
(May 2007). She has presented her research at bi-ennial New Chaucer Society congresses in Dublin, Los Angeles, Paris,
London, Boulder, Colorado, and New York, as well as at the International Medieval Congresses in Kalamazoo, Michigan and
Leeds, England, most recently in 2008.
Besides her interest in medieval literature, Professor Bishop professes a scholarly interest in the Renaissance
and has taught a number of classes for the University of Oregon English Department, including Shakespeare classes
and the survey of English literature. In 1993 Professor Bishop was presented the University of Oregon Ersted Award
for Distinguished Teaching, and has served both on-campus and in the national sphere as an expert in the scholarship
of teaching. Professor Bishop is also one of the directors of the Feminist Humanities Project and a member of the
Healing Arts research interest group housed in the Center for the Study of Women in Society.
In her current research, Professor Bishop posits an important intersection between vernacular medical texts and
vernacular poetry in her book, Words, Stones and Herbs: The Healing Word in Medieval and Early Modern England
(Syracuse University Press, 2007). She is working on a book on the afterlife of Chaucer and Langland in the
sixteenth-through nineteenth centuries.
Website
Robert Clapperton
Session: Cognitive Maps
Topic: The Allegorical Construction of Ideology
Robert Clapperton is a PhD candidate in English Language and Literature at the University of Waterloo.
His research interests include cognitive rhetoric and poetics with an emphasis on cognitive mapping.
Robert's thesis will explore the cognitive construction of ideology shaped through a subject's interaction
with literary texts and media discourse.
Tristanne Connolly
Session: Metonymy, Personification (Moderator)
Topic: Coleridge and Blake on Allegory
Tristanne Connolly is Assistant Professor at St. Jerome's University in the University of Waterloo.
She is the author of William Blake and the Body (Palgrave, 2002), co-editor of Queer Blake (with Helen Bruder,
forthcoming Palgrave 2009) and Liberating Medicine 1720-1830 (with Steve Clark, forthcoming Pickering & Chatto 2009),
and author of several articles on Blake. She is a co-investigator on a multidisciplinary group research project,
"City Life and Well-Being: The Grey Zone of Health and Illness", funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research
(CIHR), and based at the University of Waterloo and the Culture of Cities Centre, Toronto; her module of this project
examines representations of reproduction in eighteenth-century Britain. She has a minor specialization in Medieval
literature, theology and exegesis, having written her MA thesis on Old and Middle English dream vision poems,
reading them as devotional literature.
Website
Mary Crane
Session: Narrative
Topic: Spenserian Allegory and Scientific Analogy
Mary Thomas Crane is Professor of English at Boston College. She received her BA and PhD from Harvard University.
She is the author of Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth-Century England (Princeton University
Press, 1993) and Shakespeare's Brain: Reading with Cognitive Theory (Princeton, 2000). Recently, she has written
articles that attempt to use cognitive theory to understand the impact of the scientific revolution on English
literature. These include "The Physics of King Lear: Cognition in a Void," Graham Bradshaw, Tom Bishop, and Mark Turner,
eds., The Shakespearean International Yearbook, Vol. 4 (2004): 3-23; and "Analogy, Metaphor and the New Science:
Cognitive Science and Early Modern Epistemology," forthcoming in Lisa Zunshine, ed., Introduction to Cognitive Cultural
Studies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press).
Website
Pre-Workshop Lecture
The UW Department of English Language and Literature presents a public lecture by Mary Thomas Crane, of
Boston College. The lecture, entitled Analogy, Metaphor, & the New Science: Cognitive Science and Early Modern Epistemology, will be on Thursday, 25 June, at 7:00 PM, 3014 St. Jerome’s University.
Abstract
Contemporary cognitive science offers insights into metaphor, analogy, and human thought that have the potential to radically change our view of the early modern scientific revolution. If, as Lakoff and Johnson have argued, all human thought is built up metaphorically from the basic kinesthetic experiences of living in a body, no scientific system could dispense completely with analogy. Analogy didn’t disappear from the realm of cognition in the seventeenth century as Foucault and others have argued, but became more important, albeit in altered form.
An older system of correspondences based on the perception of shared qualities (like heat, cold, and density) gave way to a use of analogy to convey the structural relationships among things that were qualitatively different (like tiny invisible atoms making up what appears to be a solid surface). In addition, cognitive studies of “naïve,” or “intuitive” science and of the nature of conceptual change allow us to understand the ways in which the transition to the new science drove a wedge between scientists and non-scientists that had never existed before.
Cognitive science helps us to understand the implications of the scientific revolution for ordinary (non-scientific) thought and language in new ways, as everyday experience of the natural world was severed from scientific explanations of it and ordinary people could no longer trust their experience of the world to reveal the truth about its nature. Finally, a recognition of the difference between qualitative and structural analogies can help us understand the change in poetic language from the sixteenth to the seventeenth centuries. A famous example from John Donne—the “stiff, twin compasses,”— illustrates this change.
Peter Crisp
Session: Cognitive Maps
Topic: Cognitive Modelling and Historical Interpretation
Peter Crisp is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
He completed his PhD dissertation on "Time Past and Present in the Cantos of Ezra Pound" at The University of
Reading in 1980. Crisp has held teaching positions in Nigeria, Canada, and China. His recent publications include
"Allegory, Blending, and Possible Situations" (2005), "Allegory and symbol - a fundamental opposition?" (2005), and
"Between Extended Metaphor and Allegory - Is Blending Enough" (2008).
Pre-Workshop Open Class
The Chinese University of Hong Kong presents an open class with Peter Crisp, of The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Crisp will be discussing his pioneering studies on the cognitive dimensions of allegory. The open class will be on Wednesday, 24 June, from 9:00am - 12:00pm, in Dana Porter Library, Room 329, the FLEX Lab. All faculty and students of the UW English department are welcome. Others please contact Randy Harris or
Sarah Tolmie for access.
Open Class Information
Several of Crisp's important papers— “Allegory, Maps, and Modernity: Cognitive Change from Bunyan to Forster” (2003),
“Allegory, Blending, and Possible Situations” (2005), “Allegory and Symbol: A Fundamental Opposition?” (2005), and
“Between Extended Metaphor and Allegory: Is Blending Enough” (2008) — are available for download at the English 793CA website: www.arts.uwaterloo.ca/~raha/793CA_web/793CA-09schedule.html.
Philip Eubanks
Session: Metonymy
Topic: Conceptual Metaphor and Allegory
Philip Eubanks is associate professor and acting chair in the Department of English at Northern Illinois University. He earned his PhD in English, associated with the Center for Writing Studies, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of A War of Words in the Discourse of Trade: The Rhetorical Constitution of Metaphor (2000) and numerous scholarly articles on metaphor and rhetoric, most recently: "A Kind Word for Bullshit: The Problem of Academic Writing" in College Composition and Communication (2008) and "An Analysis of Corporate Rule in Globalization Discourse: Why We Need Rhetoric to Explain Conceptual Figures" in Rhetoric Review (2008). He is currently working on a book-length project, tentatively titled "How We Figure Writing: Metaphor and Beyond."
Dolores Frese
Session: Metonymy (Moderator)
Dolores Warwick Frese is Professor of English and Fellow of the Medieval Institute at the University of Notre Dame, where she teaches both graduate and undergraduate classes in a variety of medieval vernacular poetic fictions, including Chaucerian and Arthurian literatures. She has published essays and reviews on a number of Anglo-Saxon and Middle English topics, and co-edited two essay collections: Anglo-Saxon Poetry, Essays in Appreciation (with Lewis E. Nicholson) and The Book and the Body (with Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe). Her monographic study, An Ars Legendi for Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (1991), was awarded the Hans Rosenhaupt Prize by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation for distinguished scholarship in the humanities. Presently, she is completing a new book that examines Chaucerian Allegories of Vernacular Practice in the Canterbury Tales. In addition to scholarly writing, she has also published ina variety of non-academic genres that include novels, poetry and short story, and for a number of years was a member of the renowned Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa, where she completed her doctoral work in English. In addition to her teaching at Notre Dame, she has also held invited Visiting Professorships at Univeristy of California, Berkeley and at the University of Northern Michigan.
Website
Ronald J. Ganze
Session: Narrative
Topic: Augustine's Confessions: Memory, Cognition, and the Neurology of Narrative
Ronald Ganze is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of South Dakota, where he teaches medieval literature.
His work with cognitive theory includes his dissertation, Concepts of the Self from Augustine to King Alfred
(University of Oregon, 2004), a chapter-length study of the medieval self in Misconceptions About the Middle Ages
(Routledge, 2007), presentations of papers on Augustine's Confessions and cognitive creativity in Chaucer, and the
co-organization of conference panels on cognitive approaches to medieval literature and the group Medieval Cognitive
Literary and Scientific Studies. Professor Ganze has also published on the Old English poem The Wanderer and the
Middle English poem Pearl, and is in the process of preparing a manuscript based on his dissertation, which advocates
the use of cognitive and phenomenological approaches to medieval self to correct the current predominance of social
constructionism.
Website
Raymond W. Gibbs
Closing Address
Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr. is Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is author of
The poetics of mind: Figurative thought, language, and understanding (1994), Intentions in the experience of meaning (1999), and Embodiment and cognitive science (2006). He is editor of Cambridge handbook of metaphor and
thought (2008), and co-editor with Gerard Steen of Metaphor in cognitive linguistics (1999), with Herbert
Colston of Irony in language and thought: A cognitive science reader (2007), as well as editor of the journal Metaphor and Symbol.
Website
Pre-Workshop Lecture
The UW Programme in Cognitive Science presents a public lecture by Raymond W. Gibbs Jr., of The University of California, Santa Cruz. The lecture, entitled Embodiment in Metaphorical Imagination, will be on Thursday, 25 June, at 1:00pm, PAS 1229.
Abstract
Metaphor scholars in cognitive science now argue that metaphor is not just a linguistic device, but also a fundamental part of human cognition. Conceptual metaphors such as LIFE IS A JOURNEY or UNDERSTANDING IS GRASPING are pervasive in ordinary speech and writing, appear to be essential for how people conceive abstract concepts, and may be quickly recruited during many aspects of language production and under- standing. Recent research even suggests that many conceptual metaphors
appear to be grounded in recurring patterns of bodily experience, and thus provide
additional evidence in favor of “embodied cognition.” Raymond Gibbs will offer an analysis
of conceptual metaphors from a multidisciplinary perspective, and de- scribe recent empirical
evidence in support of the idea that many aspects of abstract thought are structured in terms of
embodied metaphor. He will argue that people ordinarily engage in embodied simulation processes when using metaphorical language, and, more generally, thinking in imaginative ways about their lives and the world around them.
Kenneth Graham
Session: Cognitive Maps (Moderator)
Kenneth Graham teaches Renaissance literature and rhetoric in the
English Deparment at the University of Waterloo. His research
investigates the relationship of English literature to the rhetorical
culture of Renaissance humanism and the disciplinary culture of the
English Reformation, as well as to the rhetorical culture of the
English Reformation and the disciplinary culture of Renaissance
humanism. His publications include The Performance of Conviction:
Plainness and Rhetoric in the Early English Renaissance (Cornell
University Press) and, as co-editor, Shakespeare and Religious Change
(Palgrave Macmillan, in press).
Website
Curtis Gruenler
Session: Cognitive Maps
Topic: Cognitive Allegory and Medieval Biblical Exegesis
Curtis Gruenler is an associate professor of English at Hope College in Holland, Michigan, where he teaches medieval literature. He received his Ph.D. in 1998 from UCLA, and most of his research is related to his book-in-progress called The Medieval Poetics of Enigma: Riddles, Rhetoric, and Theology in Piers Plowman and its Contemporaries. He has also published “Desire, Violence, and the Passion in Fragment VII of The Canterbury Tales: A Girardian Reading” (1999) and “Dante’s Quest for Home” (2000).
Website
Craig Hamilton
Session: Cognitive Maps
Topic: Censorship and Conceptual Blending
Craig Hamilton is Associate Professor of English Cognitive Linguistics at the University of Haute
Alsace in France. He has held previous positions at the University of California-Irvine, the University of
Nottingham, and the University of Paris. In 2001, he earned his PhD at the University of Maryland, where he
studied with Mark Turner. Craig has published widely on cognitive linguistic approaches to modern literature.
His articles and reviews have appeared in many journals, including Style, Language and Literature, English
Language Notes, Modern Drama, Cognitive Linguistics, and the Times Literary Supplement.
His current research focuses on conceptual blending and censorship.
Randy Harris
Workshop Organizer
Randy Allen Harris works in a variety of academic and professional fields: Technical Communication and
Interaction Design (Voice Interaction Design: Crafting the New Conversational Interfaces [Elsevier, 2005];
Rhetorical Theory, Science Studies, and Argumentation (Landmark Studies in Rhetoric of Science [Lawrence Erlbaum, 1997]),
Rhetoric and Incommensurability [Parlor Press, 2005]); Literary and Rhetorical Criticism; Aphasiology
(Functor Comprehension in Broca's Aphasia [IULC, 1985]); Linguistics (The Linguistics War [Oxford, 1993]); and
Cognitive Rhetoric. The latter is the most recent. His cognitive interests are longstanding, though they have
only really penetrated his rhetorical work since the turn of the century, under the influence of Jeanne Fahnestock's
profound book, Rhetorical Figures in Scientific Argumentation (Oxford, 1999). But he is increasingly convinced that a
theory of rhetoric that leaves out cognition is like a theory of eating that leaves out digestion.
Website
Shelley Hulan
Session: Narrative (Moderator)
Shelley Hulan is an Associate Professor in English at the University of Waterloo. She specializes in early Canadian literature. Journals in which her articles have appeared or are forthcoming include the Journal of Canadian Studies, Essays on Canadian Writing, Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, and Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews. Her most recent work has examined the role of ceremonial rhetoric in the nineteenth-century writing of Ojibwe authors George Copway/Kahgegagahbowh and Peter Edmund Jones/Kahkewaquonaby. An essay on the former has been tentatively accepted for inclusion in National Plots: Historical Fiction and Changing Ideas of Canada, ed. Andrea Cabajsky (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier UP, forthcoming 2009).
Website
Madeleine Kasten
Session: Metonymy
Topic: Voltaire’s Allegory of Reason
Madeleine Kasten is an assistant professor at the Literary Studies Department of Leiden University, The Netherlands.
She has published on medieval and Enlightenment allegory, on philosophy of language, and on Shakespeare.
In 2007, her research in the field of allegory resulted in the publication of a study entitled In Search of
'Kynde Knowynge': Piers Plowman and the Origin of Allegory. One of her more recent interests concerns the
relationship between allegory and the art of literary translation.
Norman Klassen
Session: Metonymy
Topic: Emotional Intelligence? Cognitive Allegory and Emotions
Norm Klassen received his doctorate from University of Oxford, where he studied under the eminent medievalist
Helen Cooper. His publications include Chaucer on Love, Knowledge, and Sight (1995) and The Passionate Intellect
(2007, co-authored); he has most recently written on Chaucer's tonal achievement in Parliament of Fowls.
Norm also enjoys the infinitely perfectible task of fanning the flame of undergraduates' interest in English
literature and the life of the mind more generally. He is associate professor and chair of the English department
at St Jerome's University, Waterloo.
Website
Paula Leverage
Session: Narrative
Topic: Embodiment and Cognition in Le Roman de la Rose: Dream States and Memory
Paula Leverage is an Assistant Professor of French and Medieval Studies, and Director of the Center for Cognitive Literary Studies at Purdue University. She is a graduate of Cambridge University and Toronto University, where she first discovered cognitive literary analysis as a doctoral student and Commonwealth Scholar. Her book Memory and Reception: A Cognitive Approach to the Chansons de Geste is forthcoming (Rodopi, 2009). She has also published extensively on memory and literature in journals such as Romania, Romance Notes, Dalhousie French Studies, Olifant, and book collections.
In November 2007, she co-organized Theory of Mind and Literature at Purdue University with colleagues in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, and the Department of Psychological Sciences (http://www.cla.purdue.edu/fll/ToM/ ), and is co-editing a collection of essays (Theory of Mind and Literature) with these same colleagues (Howard Mancing, Richard Schweickert and Jennifer William). She also co-organizes conference sessions on cognitive approaches to medieval literature, and the group Medieval Cognitive Literary and Scientific Studies. At Purdue she teaches cognitive literary theory in her department and for interdisciplinary programs.
Website
Uri Margolin
Session: Narrative
Topic: The Cognitive Turn in Narratology: Major Revolution or Minor Restatement?
Uri Margolin is a professor emeritus of comparative literature, with specialization in literary theory, at the
University of Alberta, Edmonton. Areas of research include narratology (structuralist, cognitive and philosophical
approaches), general methodology and meta theory, and Slavic Formalism, Structuralism and semiotics. Publications
to date include close to 70 items in collective volumes, encyclopedias and international professional journals.
Margolin has spent a total of three years at the universities of Konstanz and Freiburg, Germany, as an Alexander
von Humboldt scholar.
Todd Oakley
Session: Cognitive Maps
Topic: Allegorical Spaces: Hypotyposis and Attention at the Intersection of Language, Space, and Meaning
Todd Oakley is an Associate Professor of Cognitive Science, a Director of the MA Program in Cognitive
Linguistics, and a Co-Director of the Center for Cognition and Culture at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland,
Ohio. As of July 1, 2009, Oakley will also be the Chair of the Cognitive Science Department. Oakley completed his PhD in English at the University of Maryland at College Park in 1995. His research areas
include Cognitive science; cognitive linguistics; linguistic theory; rhetorical theory; and others. Oakley has
published extensively, including From Attention to Meaning: Explorations in Semiotics, Linguistics, and Rhetoric
(2009); "Conceptual Blending and the Classic Feature Film" (forthcoming); and "Attention and Semiotics" (2008).
Website
Daniela O'Neill
Session: Narrative
Topic: Developing narrative: Exploring preliterate children's mental representations of narrative
Daniela O'Neill is an Associate Professor in the Psychology department at the University of Waterloo.
She completed her PhD at Stanford University in 1993. O'Neill has published and co-published numerous
journal articles, such as "The emergence of the ability to track a character's mental perspective in narrative"
(2007); "The Language Use Inventory for Young Children" (2007); and "The emergence of episodic future thinking in
humans" (2005). She has given a number of invited conference presentations on various topics, including Small talk
and stories: children's developing models of self and other (May 2004) and Talking about "new" information: Why
theory mind matters to language development (April 2002).
Website
James J. Paxson
Session: Personification
Topic: The Cognitive Allegory of Personification and the Cognitive Structures of Narrative Embedding
James J. Paxson is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Florida. He earned his PhD in
English at SUNY at Stony Brook in 1989. Paxson published his first book, The Poetics of Personification,
in 1994 and is currently working on his second book, Theories Master Tropes and Imagining the Institution of
English Studies. Other selected publications include "Masculinity and Its Hydraulic Semiotics in Chaucer's Troilus
and Criseyde" (forthcoming); "Theorizing Levinas' Face: Poststructuralism, Scientific Humanism and Problems in Late
Medieval Personification Allegory" (forthcoming); and "The Anachronism of Imagining Film in the Middle Ages: Wegener's
Der Golem and Chaucer's Knight's Tale" (2007).
Paul Thagard
Opening Address: The Brain is Wider than the Sky: Cognition, Emotion, and Allegory
Paul Thagard is Professor of Philosophy, with cross appointment to Psychology and Computer Science, Director
of the Cognitive Science Program, and University Research Chair, at the University of Waterloo. He is a graduate
of the Universities of Saskatchewan, Cambridge, Toronto (Ph. D. in philosophy) and Michigan (M.S. in computer science).
He is the author of Hot Thought: Mechanisms and Applications of Emotional Cognition (MIT Press, 2006), Coherence in
Thought and Action (MIT Press, 2000), How Scientists Explain Disease (Princeton University Press, 1999), Mind:
Introduction to Cognitive Science (MIT Press, 1996; second edition, 2005), Conceptual Revolutions (Princeton University
Press, 1992), and Computational Philosophy of Science (MIT Press, 1988); and co-author of Mental Leaps: Analogy in
Creative Thought (MIT Press, 1995) and Induction: Processes of Inference, Learning, and Discovery (MIT Press, 1986).
He is currently writing a book called Brains and the Meaning of Life.
He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the Cognitive Science Society, and in 2007 received a Canada Council
for the Arts Molson Prize.
Website
Sarah Tolmie
Workshop Organizer
Sarah Tolmie is an Associate Professor in the English department at Waterloo. She completed a Cambridge PhD
dissertation on Lancastrian and Bruce royal historiography in 1999 and has latterly been publishing on the
poetic career of Thomas Hoccleve ("The Prive Scilence of Thomas Hoccleve," SAC 2000; "The Professional:
Thomas Hoccleve," SAC 2007) and on the cognitive poetics of William Langland's Piers Plowman ("Langland and the
End of Language," YLS 2006; "Langland and the Language Game" YLS 2008; "The Book of the World as I Found It:
Langland and Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Exemplaria 20.4, 2008). She is writing a book
tentatively entitled Langland and the Philosophy of Language.
Website
