Dr. Cristóbal Pagán Cánovas – Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies

Dr. Cristóbal Pagán Cánovas

Classics and English Philology
University of Murcia
October 2012 – March 2013

E-Mail: cristobal.pagan.canovas@frias.uni-freiburg.de

Last Update: 31.08.2013

Curriculum Vitae

PhD in Classics University of Murcia, M.A. in Classics University of London (UCL), undergraduate degrees in Classics (including a two-year Erasmus stay at Athens University) and English from the U. of Murcia. I am now a Marie Curie Researcher at the University of Murcia, a post funded by the European Commission (Marie Curie International Outgoing fellowships 2008). My research project (The Narrative Lyric) includes stays as visiting scholar at UC San Diego (September 2009-Spring 2010) and at CWRU Cleveland (Spring 2010-Fall 2011). I’ve been teaching modern Greek at the University of Murcia as a lecturer (2001-2009) while at the same time holding a post as tenured English teacher in Spanish public secondary education (2000-present). I have worked in several EU projects related to the design and dissemination of modern Greek language teaching materials. Both my PhD and my current research project apply tenets of cognitive science (mainly conceptual integration and schemata of everyday spatial interaction) to study poetic imagery related to emotions, mostly in Greek literature but also in other traditions.

Selected Publications

Coulson, S. & Pagán Cánovas, C. Forthcoming. Understanding Timelines: Conceptual Metaphor and Conceptual Integration. Cognitive Semiotics, Special issue on Conceptual Metaphor Theory.
Pagán Cánovas, C. 2011. The Genesis of the Arrows of Love: Diachronic Conceptual Integration in Greek Mythology. American Journal of Philology 132:4. 553-579.
Pagán Cánovas, C. 2010. Erotic Emissions in Greek Poetry: A Generic Integration Network. Cognitive Semiotics 6. 7-32.

FRIAS Project

Towards a Cognitive Oral Poetics: Traditional Epic and Cognitive Linguistics (together with Mihailo Antović).

Our project combines our expertise in classics, Homeric studies and cognitive poetics (Pagán Cánovas) and in cognitive linguistics, musicolinguistics, and Serbo-Croatian linguistics (Antović) to lay the foundations of a cognitive oral poetics. We will integrate cognitive linguistics with the comparative oral poetics of Homer, epic poetry in Serbo-Croatian, and medieval epics in modern Greek, Spanish, or French.
Our main interest is to connect the mechanisms of meaning construction detected by oral poetics scholars to research on language and cognition. We will focus on a) the application of cognitive grammar and conceptual mappings research to the analysis of formulaic diction, and b) the contrastive study of spatial cognition patterns in idiomatic expressions, from both oral epics and everyday language.
We expect our research to produce two major theoretical-methodological innovations:

We will contribute to the enquiry about the origins of music, language and song as products of higher order cognition.

We will establish the foundations of cognitive oral poetics, with implications for many areas in cognitive science and linguistics.