Personal statement

From Sept 2014- August 2017 I had a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship to pursue the project 'Epiphanies in literature: a psychological and literary linguistic account'. I studied a family of experiences which includes the sublime, literary epiphanies, mystical experience, peak experience, ecstasy, awe, etc. My current approach is to treat these all as responses to schematic discrepancy.  This partially explains the epistemic feelings which arise - feeling of learning, feeling of significance and feeling of ineffability; and it explains the emotions, as 'surprise emotions'.  In 2017, I gave talks on this topic at Strathclyde (psychology), Stirling and Derby, in Canberra, Sydney, Athens and Paris. I am now completing the book on this topic, tentatively titled  'Chills, epiphany and the sublime'.  

I also continue to work on poetic form, and the setting of poetry to music in songs. I will be giving talks on these topics in Amsterdam (May 2018), Padua (June 2018) and Stavanger (July 2018).  In 2017, I published and article with Myfany Turpin on song, dance and music in Australian Aboriginal ceremony, from a cognitive perspective.

My tenth book was What is Poetry: Language and Memory in the Poems of the World (Cambridge 2015); the book argues that the added forms of poetry such as metre, rhyme, alliteration and parallelism depend on the division of a text into sections short enough to be held in working memory.  My book with Morris Halle, Meter in Poetry: a New Theory (Cambridge 2008), argues that counting is the basis of all metrical poetry, and rhythm is derived from the counting mechanism.  My book Language and literary structure: the linguistic analysis of form in verse and narrative (Cambridge 2002) argues that form can hold of a literary text by inference.

PhD in linguistics from MIT (1984) supervised by Noam Chomsky. Edited Journal of Linguistics (1997-2014). Head of department (2002-5). Acting dean during the first two months of the new Faculty in 2010. Vice-dean for research (2010-13). Harkness Fellow (1980-81). Leverhulme Fellow (2014-17). An editor of the Literary Universals Project. 

I teach four undergraduate classes: the first year English class (spring); language in business and organizations; songs and literature; international influences on literature in English.  I teach one postgraduate class on 'intercultural communication' as part of the MSc in TESOL and intercultural communication.

I welcome PhD students in literature, literary linguistics, and psychology of literature.