Robert S. Astur, PhD, is the director of the Virtual Reality Laboratory, Olin Neuropsychiatry Research Center in Hartford, Connecticut, and assistant professor adjunct in the Department of Psychiatry of Yale University School of Medicine. His current projects include: the application of virtual spatial memory tests to psychiatric groups with specific brain abnormalities; examining the effects of abused drugs on memory processes and brain activity; and deciphering the effects of gender and aging on memory processes.
José Barroso Castro received his PhD from Cornell University. He is currently Director of Editorial Mendaur, a Spanish press that publishes books on literature, humanism, religion, and the history of Spain and Europe. He is the author of two books on the theory of reading and textual criticism: Sobre la comprensión poética (Madrid: Visor-Antonio Machado Libros, 2001); and Memorias da morte: A cultura clerical do pasamento (Pobra do Caramiñal: Editorial Mendaur, 2009). Among his recent articles are: “Las Meninas y Don Quijote: dos modos para la identificación en mundos ética y poéticamente posibles,” Critica del testo 9 (2006), 2-19; and “Conciencia en acto: autoextrañamiento y reminiscencias clásicas en “Adolescencia” de Vicente Aleixandre,” Iberoromania 63 (2006), 27-51.
Ineke Bockting holds doctoral degrees from the Universities of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and Montpellier, France. She has taught at universities in The Netherlands, Norway, and France, and she is now a full professor at the University of Paris, France. Her publications include articles on various aspects of the American South, ethnic literatures, travel-narrative, autobiography, and literary stylistics and pragmatics, as well as a book-length study of the novels of William Faulkner, entitled Character and Personality in the Novels of William Faulkner: A Study in Psychostylistics (Lanham: University Press of America, 1995).
Fritz Breithaupt received his PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 1997. He was the Distinguished Remak Scholar (2009-10) at Indiana University, where he teaches as associate professor of Germanic Studies and adjunct professor of Comparative Literature and Cognitive Science. He is the author of Kulturen der Empathie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2009); Der Ich-Effekt des Geldes: Zur Geschichte einer Legitimationsfigur (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2008); and a book on Johann Wolfgang Goethe entitled Jenseits der Bilder: Goethes Politik der Wahrnehmung (Rombach: Freiburg, 2000). At Indiana University he has served as director of West European Studies and the official EU Center of Excellence. He also writes a column on academia for the magazine Zeit Campus.
Diana Calderazzo is a PhD candidate in Theatre Arts at the University of Pittsburgh, currently living in Manhattan and writing her dissertation on cognitive-based approaches to experiencing and understanding the work of Stephen Sondheim. Her writing on related topics has appeared in Theatre Journal, Theatre Symposium, and The Sondheim Review. She teaches for Fordham University College of Liberal Studies in Westchester, New York.
Vince D. Calhoun, PhD, is the Director of Image Analysis of MR Research at The Mind Research Network in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he develops techniques for making sense of complex brain imaging data. Because each imaging modality has limitations, the integration of these data is needed to understand the healthy and especially the disordered human brain. Calhoun has created algorithms that map dynamic networks of brain function, structure, and genetics, and how these are impacted while being stimulated by various tasks or in individuals with mental illness such as schizophrenia. He is associate professor within the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Neurosciences, and Computer Science, at the University of New Mexico, and associate professor, adjunct, in the Department of Psychiatry at Yale University
Mikko Keskinen is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. He is the author of Response, Resistance, Deconstruction: Reading and Writing in / of Three Novels by John Updike (Jyväskylä: Jyväskylä University Press, 1998) and Audio Book: Essays on Sound Technologies in Narrative Fiction (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2008). He has published numerous articles on literary theory and contemporary American, British, and French literature in journals such as Critique, Journal of International Women’s Studies, PsyArt, The Romanic Review, and Imaginaires. His recent chapter-length contributions to edited volumes on criticism have appeared in Novels of the Contemporary Extreme (London: Continuum, 2006) and Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction: Transatlantic Perspectives on Don DeLillo (London: Continuum, 2010).
Seth Knox received his PhD from the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages at Wayne State University. He is currently Assistant Professor of German at Adrian College in Adrian, Michigan. Knox is the author of Weimar Germany between Two Worlds: The American and Russian Travels of Kisch, Toller, Holitscher, Goldschmidt, and Rundt (New York: Lang, 2006). He is also the author of several entries in The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Folktales and Fairy Tales (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2008) and “A Political Tourist Visits the Future: Ernst Toller’s American and Russian Travels near the End of the Weimar Republic” in Cross Cultural Travel: Papers from the Royal Irish Academy Modern Languages Symposium on Literature and Travel, National University of Ireland, Galway, November 2002 (New York: Lang, 2003).
Paula Leverage is Associate 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 theory as a doctoral student and Commonwealth Scholar. She is the author of Memory and Reception: A Cognitive Approach to the Chansons de Geste (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010) and has also published extensively on memory and literature in journals such as Romania, Romance Notes, Dalhousie French Studies, Olifant, and book collections.
Dan Lloyd is the Thomas C. Brownell Professor of Philosophy at Trinity College, Connecticut. He is the author of Radiant Cool: A Novel Theory of Consciousness (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004), a book joining noir fiction with a theory of consciousness, and Simple Minds (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989). His current projects include Ghosts in the Machine (Rowan and Littlefield, forthcoming), a philosophical dialogue about minds, brains, and computers, and Subjective Time (MIT Press, forthcoming), an anthology on the philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience of experienced temporality. He is the editor of the journal Frontiers in Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, and in his spare time he likes to convert brain scan data into music.
Orley K. Marron teaches at Bar Ilan University, Israel, from which she received her PhD in English Literature. She has a MSc degree in Computer Science from Marist College as well as a BSc in biology from the University of Houston, where she worked for several years in neurobiology research. Her dissertation explored the function of animated man-made objects in the literature of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Lewis Carroll, and how such objects are used to convey algorithmic problem solving or moral dilemma resolution. Her current work explores Theories of Mind in science fiction, visual art in fantastic literature, and fantastic models for dealing with trauma.
Howard Mancing is Professor of Spanish at Purdue University. He is the author of The Chivalric World of Don Quijote: Style, Structure, and Narrative Technique (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1982); Text, Theory, and Performance: Golden Age Come-dia Studies, co-edited with Charles Ganelin (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1994); The Cervantes Encyclopedia, 2 vols. (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2004); and Miguel de Cervantes’ “Don Quixote”: A Reference Guide (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2006). In addition, he has published over forty articles and essays on Cervantes, Unamuno, Lazarillo de Tormes, and the picaresque novel, narrative theory, comparative literature, the canon, the teaching of literature, academic administration, cognitive approaches to the study of literature, and other subjects, in a variety of books and in journals such as Anales Cervantinos, Cervantes, Estudios Públicos, Forum for Modern Language Studies, Hispania, Hispanic Review, Modern Language Notes, Modern Fiction Studies, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, and Semiotica. He is currently the President of the Cervantes Society of America. At the present time he is working on a book on cognitive science and literary theory tentatively titled Voices in Everything: Restoring the Human Context to Literary Theory.
Keith Oatley is Professor Emeritus of Cognitive Psychology at the University of Toronto, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and a Fellow of the British Psychological Society. His research focuses on the psychology of emotions and the psychology of fiction. He is the author or co-author of some 150 journal articles and chapters, and six books on psychology, including: Best Laid Schemes: The Psychology of Emotions (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992) and Selves in Relation: An Introduction to Psychotherapy and Groups (London: Methuen, 1984). He has also written two novels, one of which, The Case of Emily V. (London: Secker and Warburg, 1993), won the 1994 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Novel. He also edits and writes for OnFiction: An Online Magazine on the Psychology of Fiction.
Alan Palmer is an independent scholar living in London. He is the author of Social Minds in the Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010), and Fictional Minds (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004). Fictional Minds was a co-winner of the Modern Language Association Prize for Independent Scholars and also a co-winner of the Perkins Prize (awarded by the International Society for the Study of Narrative). His articles have been published in the journals Narrative, Semiotica, and Style, and he has contributed chapters to several edited volumes. He is an honorary research fellow at the Department of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University.
Godfrey Pearlson, MD, is the director of the Olin Neuropsychiatry Research Center, a state-of-the-art fMRI facility in Hartford, Connecticut, and Professor of Psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine. His research projects include: identifying the structural and functional cerebral correlates of normal aging and of major neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative psychiatric disorders; determining the functional cerebral actions of abused drugs; and exploring the interactions between genetics, neuroimaging, and pre-symptomatic expression of brain-based disorders in at-risk persons.
Natalie Phillips is a PhD candidate in English at Stanford University, where she is currently an American Council of Learned Societies / Mellon Fellow. Her current project, Distraction: Problems of Attention in Eighteenth-Century Literature, argues that the emergence of competing theories of attention in the Enlightenment transformed both how writers portrayed the fictional mind and how they sought to capture readers’ focus. She has received fellowships from the Stanford Humanities Center, the Mabelle McLeod Lewis Fund, and the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing. Her most recent article, “‘Tis Tris’: Tristram Shandy and the Literary History of a Cognitive Slip,” has been solicited by Modern Philology, and her manuscript, “Economies of Attention: Readers and the Eighteenth-Century Essay,” is forthcoming as a chapter in The History of Reading (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
Klarina Priborkin received her PhD from Bar Ilan University, Israel. Her thesis, Ghostly Bridges: Cross-Cultural Mother / Daughter Storytelling in Postmodern Texts by Ethnic American Women Writers, focuses on problems of cross-cultural communication between ethnic mothers and their American-born daughters. Priborkin currently teaches English and American literature at Givat Washington College of Education. Her article “Mother’s Dreams, Father’s Stories: Family and Identity Construction in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s ‘Queen of Dreams’” has been published in South Asian Review 29 (2009), 199-219. She has also published “Cross-Cultural Mind-Reading or Coming to Terms with the Ethnic Mother in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior” in Toward a Cognitive Theory of Narrative Acts, ed. Frederick Luis Aldama (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010).
Richard Schweickert is Professor of Psychological Sciences at Purdue University. He developed an interest in dreams while working on his bachelor’s degree in mathematics at Santa Clara University. After working as a statistician at Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital, he received his master’s degree in mathematics from Indiana University and his PhD in mathematical psychology from the University of Michigan. His research is on network models of human information processing, short-term memory, and dreams. He has served as Associate Editor of Psychonomic Bulletin & Review and Editor of the Journal of Mathematical Psychology. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the Association for Scientific Psychology.
Mark Turner is Institute Professor and Professor of Cognitive Science at Case Western Reserve University. He is the founding director of the Cognitive Science Network. His most recent book publication is an edited volume, The Artful Mind: Cognitive Science and the Riddle of Human Creativity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). His other books and articles include: Cognitive Dimensions of Social Science: The Way We Think about Politics, Economics, Law, and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Reading Minds: The Study of English in the Age of Cognitive Science (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); and Death is the Mother of Beauty: Mind, Metaphor, Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). He has been a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the National Humanities Center, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institute of Advanced Study of Durham University. He is a fellow of the Institute for the Science of Origins, external research professor at the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study in Cognitive Neuroscience, and distinguished fellow at the New England Institute for Cognitive Science and Evolutionary Psychology. In 1996, the Académie française awarded him the Prix du Rayonnement de la langue et de la littérature françaises.
Jennifer Marston William is Associate Professor and Chair of German at Purdue University. She has published a book on German literature, Killing Time: Waiting Hierarchies in the Twentieth-Century German Novel (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2010), in which she examines how cognitive metaphors have been used by German and Austrian novelists to reveal and criticize social hierarchical patterns. She has co-edited a critical edition of Anna Seghers’s novella Aufstand der Fischer von St. Barbara (Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 2002) and has published articles on German literature and film in such journals as German Studies Review, The Germanic Review, and the Journal of the Kafka Society of America. Her current projects include serving as co-editor for entries on German literature in The Literary Encyclopedia and a book on cognitive approaches to historical film.
Allen Wood, Professor of French, has been at Purdue University since 1984. He received his PhD from the University of Michigan in Comparative Literature. He has published Literary Satire and Theory: A Study of Horace, Boileau, and Pope (New York: Garland, 1985) and Le Mythe de Phèdre: Les Hippolyte français du dix-septième siècle (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1996), an edition of three seventeenth-century French tragedies treating the Phaedra plot. He has written some thirty articles on various aspects of seventeenth-century French literature, including the more recent “Racine’s Esther and the Biblical / Modern Jew” in Papers in Seventeenth Century French Literature 36 (2009), 209-18, and a forthcoming study, “Molière’s Miser, Old Age, and Potency” for Age on Stage, ed. Leni Marshall and Valerie Lipscomb (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming). Professor Wood is also co-editor of the journal Global Business Languages and Editor in French for the Purdue Studies in Romance Literatures series.
Zhuangzhuang Xi is a graduate student in the Department of Psychological Sciences at Purdue University. She has a BS in Psychology and a BA in Economics, both from Peking University. She is a member of The Society for Mathematical Psychology and of The International Association for the Study of Dreams.
Lisa Zunshine is the Bush-Holbrook Professor of English at the University of Kentucky, Lexington. Her interests include eighteenth-century British literature, narrative theory, and cognitive cultural studies. She is the author of the first monograph on Theory of Mind and literature: Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006), and the following books: Bastards and Foundlings: Illegitimacy in Eighteenth-Century England (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005); Strange Concepts and the Stories They Make Possible: Cognition, Culture, Narrative (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008). She is co-editor (with Jocelyn Harris) of Approaches to Teaching the Novels of Samuel Richardson (New York: Modern Language Association, 2006), and editor of Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010).