Creativity and Cognition: A Workshop

Join us for Day 1 of a two-day event discussing creativity and cognition, in conversation with Professor Karin Kukkonen and Professor Laura Otis.

View full programme here.

What better way to close the year than a final term on creativity and cognition? The Narrative and Cognition Lab has a specific mission to turn mind research into a creativity interdisciplinary exchange of ideas, models, and methods. NCL, however, also wants to show how academic interdisciplinary work can be, and to some extent has to be, creative, generative, and risky.

Interdisciplinary careers probably more closely resemble works of art, driven as they are by reaction to unplanned challenges, and the looping chase of ideas and material work, cognition and creativrt. Interdisciplinary careers and creative work in the arts are thus equally coloured and cognitively ruled by a fairly wild and driven surrendering agency to the unpredictability of processes unfolding in time - in what Malafouris calls an enactive and extended 'dance of agency' (How Things Shape the Mind, 2014).

We have invited two highly committed and successful interdisciplinary scholars, cognitive literary scholar Professor Karin Kukkonen and former neuroscientist turned literary scholar and novelist Professor Laura Otis to share backstage stories about their interdisciplinary careers in convcersation with cognitive literary scholar Marco Bernini, and then reflect on creativity and cognition in a dedicated workshop.

Having discussed collectively the creativity of interdisciplinary careers (as a cognitive process of distributed dancing agencies), now we move to investigate creativity and cognition in artifacts, and genetic processes. Karin will be talking about the creative processes of Brontë, Laura will be talking about what scientists might be able to learn from creative writers’ techniques, and Marco will present some ongoing research on the ontological status of film locations. studios and movie props.

• Karin Kukkonen: "Reconstructing Charlotte Brontë’s Creative Process"
• Laura Otis: “Craft as Research: The Scientific Potential of Creative Writers’ Knowledge”
• Marco Bernini: "Abandoned Scaffolding in Movie-Making"

About the speakers

Karin Kukkonen is Professor in Comparative Literature at the University of Oslo. She is a specialist in cognitive approaches to literature, the history of the novel and early-modern literature. Her monographs include Probability Designs: Literature and Predictive Processing (OUP, 2020) and Creativity and Contingency in Literary Writing (Bloomsbury, forthcoming). She is the founder of LCE– Centre for Literature, Cognition and Emotions at the University of Oslo, and currently leads JEUX – Literary Games, Poetics and the Early-Modern Novel (ERC Consolidator Grant, 2024-2028).

Laura Otis compares the creative thinking of scientific and literary writers, especially in their uses of metaphor. She holds a BS in Biochemistry, an MA in Neuroscience, a PhD in Comparative Literature, and an MFA in Fiction. Otis is the author of the interdisciplinary academic books Banned Emotions, Rethinking Thought, Müller’s Lab, Networking, Membranes, and Organic Memory; the novels Clean, Refiner’s Fire, Lacking in Substance, The Memory Hive, Auf Wiedersehen, and The Tantalus Letters; and the story collection D Minor. Her research has been supported by MacArthur, Guggenheim, Fulbright, and Humboldt Fellowships. Otis is a Professor of English Emerita at Emory University and a guest scholar at the Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research in Berlin.

This hybrid event is brought to you by the Narrative and Cognition Lab in the Discovery Research Platform for Medical Humanities.

The link for online attendees will be circulated closer to the event.

This event is free to attend, but places are limited.