An introduction to biolinguistics Course description (Ewa Willim, Institute of English Studies at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków)

The main goal of this course is to introduce biolinguistics, a linguistic research agenda within cognitive science going back to the 1950s that bridges discoveries in theoretical linguistics and the natural sciences to further our understanding of the human language faculty as a unique biological object.

The main research topics pursued within biolinguistics that will be discussed in the course are:

• what constitutes the knowledge or faculty of language? (Humboldt’s problem)
• how is this knowledge or faculty of language acquired? (Plato’s problem)
• how is this knowledge implemented in the brain? (Broca’s problem)
• how did this knowledge or faculty of language evolve in the species (Darwin/s/Wallace’s problem)

Natural disaster as a factor of cultural change

Title: “Reading, Writing, & Preserving Born-Digital Literature”

This module takes students through several examples of born-digital literature, exposing them along the way to major theories such as critical code studies, platform studies, textual analysis, Media-Specific Analysis, and others. It also provides students with the opportunity to make a work of interactive fiction using Twine so that they can put theory into practice. Students will also be introduced to methods being used to preserve born-digital literature, particularly those produced with Adobe Flash and Storyspace.

Course title: "Literary Study in a Digital Age"

Talk 1: "Digital Literature & Digital Humanities: One Scholar's Hyperlinked Path"

This talk provides an introduction to born-digital literature and to the field of digital humanities as well as their intersections and opportunities, by way of tracing the trajectory of the speaker’s own scholarship over the last fifteen years.

Talk 2: "Bookishness: The Life and Afterlife of Books in our Digital Age"

This talk introduces the argument and implications of Bookishness: Loving Books in a Digital Age (Columbia University Press, 2020), a book that brings together media studies, book history, and literary criticism to explain how books still give meaning to our lives in a digital culture.

Introspection, Autobiography, and the Future of the Past in Early Modern South India

06.05- 12:00-14:30 

13.05- 12:00-13:30 

20.05- 12:00-13:30 

May 6:  Introducing Sixteenth-century South India

            1. Overview: A Revolution in Taste

            2. Introspection: Telugu Padams, Poems of the Moment

            3. The Kathakali Model of the Mind

May 13: The Autobiographical Impulse in Tamil and Malayalam

            4. The Self-Portrait of a Fool

            5. Aṭīri of Panniyur: Dreaming a God

May 20: A Grammar of Dissonance

             6. The Vivādi Note: Disjunction in Music

             7. A Reinvented Poetics

The role of Knowledge and Data in Scientific Modeling. The Case of AI.

27.05- 12:30-14:45

02.06- 12:00-15:00 

10.06- 11:00-14:00 

Current issue in Developmental Science: Theory of Mind development

24.05- 16:30-19:30 

The main aim of the workshop is to present and discuss with students one of the hot and contemporary debates in developmental psychology: how do children develop theory of mind (ToM) or mindreading? This “how” question may be broken down into three sub-questions. First, how to explain why ToM develops. This issue inspired developmental psychologists (see Sabbagh & Bowman, 2018 for review) to present at least three main groups of theoretical models and sparked a debate about the lean and rich interpretation of the core ToM abilities (e.g., false-belief understanding). Second, the question of how to measure ToM and ToM development inspired many researchers (see Grosse Wiesmann et al., 2017; Low & Perner, 2012 for review) to discuss the issue of ecological validity of false-belief tasks. The third and probably most important question is what the cognitive, linguistic and social correlates of ToM abilities are. The results of a 6-wave, mix-method, longitudinal study run in the Child Lab (www.labdziecka.psychologia.uj.edu.pl) allow the students to discuss scientific (e.g., what are the open questions for future research) and educational (e.g., how ToM relates to critical thinking or skepticism) implications of ToM research from the developmental psychology perspective.