NHS 2019 Keynote Speakers
Monika Fludernik is Professor of English Literature at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany. She is also the director of the graduate school Factual and Fictional Narration (GRK 1767). Her major research interests include narratology, linguistic approaches to literature, especially metaphor studies, ‘Law and Literature,’ postcolonial studies and eighteenth-century aesthetics. She is the author of The Fictions of Language and the Languages of Fiction (1993), the award-winning Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology (1996), Echoes and Mirrorings: Gabriel Josipovici’s Creative Oeuvre (2000) and Metaphors of Confinement: The Prison in Fact, Fiction and Fantasy (in print). Among her several (co-)edited volumes are Hybridity and Postcolonialism (1998), In the Grip of the Law (2004), Beyond Cognitive Metaphor Theory (2011) and Idleness, Indolence and Leisure in English Literature (2015). Articles have appeared in, among others, Text, Semiotica, The Journal of Historical Pragmatics, English Literary History, New Literary History, Textual Practice, ARIEL, Diacritics, and The James Joyce Quarterly.
Vittorio Gallese is professor of Psychobiology at the University of Parma, Italy, and was professor in Experimental Aesthetics at the University of London, UK (2016-2018). He is also a member of the European Brain and Behaviour Society, the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, the Società Italiana di Fisiologia and the Società italiana di Neuropsicologia. Gallese came to international fame by discovering the mirror neurons in the 80′s and 90′s, together with his research team composed of Giacomo Rizzolatti, Leonardo Fogassi and Luciano Fadiga. He collaborates with many scientific magazines and his interests range from neurophysiology to cognitive neuroscience, working with neurophysical techniques and neuroimages placing a special focus on the interdisciplinary development of the understanding of intersubjectivity, social competence and the relation between recognition and perception of an action. He was awarded a number of prizes including the Grawemeyer Award 2007 for psychology and, in 2010, the Pfeffer prize for neuropsychoanalysis. His activity as a science writer includes the publication of over one hundred articles in numerous magazines. For an overview of his work and publications, visit his personal page on the website Academia.edu.
Pier Luigi Sacco is Professor of Cultural Economics at IULM University in Milan, Co-Director of the Computational Human Behavior (CHuB) project at FBK, Trento, Senior Researcher at metaLAB (at) Harvard, and Visiting Scholar at Harvard University. He is also Special Adviser to the European Commissioner for Culture and Education, member of the MIBACT Technical-Scientific Committee for Museums and Economy, the Scientific Advisory Group of Europeana Foundation and the International Advisory Board of the Secretariat for Research, Development and Innovation of the Czech Republic.
Semir Zeki was Professor of Neurobiology at University College London until 2008 and currently holds the Professorship of Neuroesthetics there. He has specialized in studying the organization of the visual brain and more recently has also been studying the brain systems that are engaged when a visual stimulus triggers an affective state, as with beauty, desire and love. He has written several books, the most recent of which is Splendors and Miseries of the Brain (2009).
