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Assistant Professor of
Cognitive Science
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Yanna Popova, assistant professor in the Department
of Cognitive Science, (D.Phil in Language and Literature, University
of Oxford) has previously taught at the Universities of Oxford
and Birmingham. Her education has been in linguistics, literature,
and philosophy and her main areas of research are cognitive linguistics
and cognitive poetics. “I strongly believe that cognitive
science provides a new way of thinking about the verbal, visual,
and musical arts and I’m interested in the multiple ways
cognitive science can be used to throw light on questions about
the origins, significance, and effect of our cultural heritage.
The new interdisciplinarity between the arts and cognitive science
is interesting and productive because it is and should be seen
as mutually beneficial.”
Popova’s publications reflect her long-standing interest
in the relationship between language and perception, including
verbal synaesthesia. Other interests comprise verbal and pictorial
metaphor; narrative as a fundamental human cognitive ability;
and time as an aspect of human embodiment. Cognitive poetics arises
from the insights of cognitive linguistics and holds that linguistic
knowledge is figurative and embodied, and it is this situated,
embodied aspect of cognition that Popova finds most interesting
and worth pursuing.
“My main objective in research and teaching is the exploration
of how people’s subjective, felt experiences of their bodies
in action serve as part of the primary grounding for human cognition,
including language and aesthetic response. Cognition is what take
place when the body engages the physical and the cultural world
and should be studied accordingly.”
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