LIVE MINDS
Get to know some of our wonderful faculty, graduate students, and visiting scholars through these short blog posts! If you are a literature and mind undergraduate or graduate student, please let us know if there is anyone who you would be interested in interviewing.
FEATURED MIND: EMILY TROSCIANKO
Emily Troscianko is a visiting scholar with the Literature and Mind research center’s Trauma-Informed Pedagogy Project. Her research spans cognitive literary studies and health humanities, where she explores how human minds interact with literary texts. Emily co-authored a leading textbook on consciousness— Consciousness: An Introducrion, with Sue Blackmore.
FEATURED MIND: DR. DEACA
Mircea Valeriu Deaca teaches film analysis and theory, film history, and contemporary Romanian film in the Faculty of History, Department of Ancient History, Archaeology and History of Art at the University of Bucharest. In 2018, he spent some time with Literature and Mind at UCSB through a Fulbright Grant for research. His most recent book, The Control Cycle in Film. Circular Coupling from Brain to Culture was just published by Sciendo.
FEATURED MIND: PAUL MEGNA
Paul is a recent graduate of UCSB’s English PhD program, and one of the Literature and the Mind Initiative’s earliest members. His dissertation, “Emotional Ethics in Middle English Literature,” examines the surprising extent to which medieval literature anticipates recent revelations concerning emotion’s centrality in ethical decision-making.
REFLECTIONS ON IMPROVISATION
Literature and the Mind has embarked on a two-year study of improvisation. Long associated with the impromptu, the ad hoc, the spontaneous, and the ensemble, improvisation currently is a popular topic in an array of disciplines because of the alternatives it poses to conventional and canonical standards of thought.
FEATURED MIND: SOWON PARK
Sowon is joining the UCSB English Department as a faculty member in the fall, from a position as Lecturer and Tutor in English at Corpus Christi College, Oxford.