Cristóbal Pagan, an ICS research fellow within the Public Discourse project, completed a six-month stay at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (IASH) of the University of Edinburgh (Scotland) thanks to a grant from the BBVA Foundation for researchers, innovators and creative artists. Dr. Pagan was one of 56 people selected from the 1,664 applications received.

The research carried out in Edinburgh is part of the EMOCCC project, the first diachronic study of the poetic expression of emotion in Greek poetry over 28 centuries.

During his stay, the philologist worked with Professor Douglas Cairns, who participates in a project entitled The History of Distributed Cognition, which deals with the understanding of cognition from classical antiquity to the present day.

Please elaborate on the research project you developed during your stay.

The project consists of studying the semantic patterns and ways of expressing the emotion of love and the moment of falling in love in Greek literature. This project is unique in that, although it seems like research on Greek literature and classical philology, it is in fact more geared toward linguistics and cognitive science. It certainly uses examples from Greek literature to understand how metaphor works in general because it serves to understand how concepts are combined and how imagination and creativity work. In this case, Greek poetry is used because it gives us 28 centuries of history with which to make comparisons.

The Greek poets from different ages often express love through a set of small spatial stories where one thing comes from another and then enters a different realm. This is a group of cognitively very basic spatial stories, from which small scenes and metaphors are created for something as complicated as explaining or putting into words how a person feels attraction, or falls in love, structured as a spatial scene.

This can be seen with the arrow of love. A mythological creature shoots a person with an arrow, which would normally result in bleeding and a hospital visit, but the result is infatuation. These symbols, which may seem absurd, work extremely well in poetry and in everyday language because human beings are made to see the world in small scenes, preferably with a spatial component.

What activities did you get involved with during your stay?

I was in very good company during my stay. My host, Douglas Cairns, is a professor of Greek at Edinburgh University and participates in the History of Distributed Cognition project, which is funded by the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council-AHRC.

This project studies the paradigm of distributed cognition, i.e., how human beings think in a certain way because their perception, their body and the relationship between the two, as well as with material things, are set up in a concrete way. From mathematics to the arts, we think through our bodies, through sensory perception, social structures, as well as through our relationship with the environment.

The project analyzes examples of intellectuals who have written on this idea, although they do not develop a structured scientific paradigm, and examples of how this phenomenon appears in the arts and humanities. It lasts four years and I came in during the first phase of its development so I have been able to participate in three of the four seminars they have organized. In one of them, I was a speaker and I gave a presentation on my research.

To what extent have you established contact with other renowned researchers?

This project is, above all, a networking project. I have attended numerous seminars in which more than 50 experts in distributed cognition have participated, thus establishing relationships with people I did not know or only knew through their work.

In addition, thanks to the project and the prestige of the BBVA Foundation grant, I have been named a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (IASH) at the University of Edinburgh. The IASH invites researchers in the humanities and social sciences from around the world. It has been a privilege to work there during my research stay and participate in the center's activities. My presence there has allowed me to discuss my research with experts from many different disciplines.

Edinburgh University is the most important European university in terms of linguistics and is active in other disciplines related to the project, which allowed me to meet researchers and engage with departments such as the Classics or the School of Psychology.

Now that you are back in Spain, what did you think of your stay?

I am very pleased because the UK has a very dynamic academic life where a lot is expected of researchers conducting a stay. At the same time, financing is difficult to get there. The BBVA Foundation grant has enabled me to participate in a research stay for which obtaining financing would have otherwise been very difficult.

I had the opportunity to discuss with experts from cognitive linguistics, as well as from other disciplines such as psychology, philology and the history of Greek culture.

What are the differences between experts in your field in Spain and the UK?

In the UK, universities are more dynamic. The linguistics and cognitive science communities, studies on embodiment and all the related paradigms, such as how cognition works depending on the structure of the human body, have more opportunities in the UK because there is more money for research. This allows for groups of researchers to more easily get together and accomplish their research goals.

In Spain, there is a very active community of linguists and cognitive scientists, but there is an obvious difference in economic means and universities' organizational structures.

What are your plans after your research stay?

In the immediate future, I will publish various articles from this research project. Some have already been submitted and I am preparing others. I'm also working on a monograph. In the medium term, I hope to publish all data from the project, along with other data from other projects, in the form of an online database.

In the long term, the relationships I have established with other researchers will prove important because we will all continue to explore these issues and several of these researchers are leaders in their fields. In the future, given the affinity of my research with that of many researchers at the University of Edinburgh, I would like to build joint projects and initiatives with the university, which is one of the best partners to have in the UK.