Cristobal
Pagan Canovas

I am a Permanent Professor (tenure-track was funded by a Ramón y Cajal, an elite national grant scheme) at the Department of English Philology, University of Murcia. I co-direct the Daedalus Lab, the Murcia Center for Cognition, Communication, and Creativity. I am a member of the Red Hen Lab, an international consortium for research into multimodal communication. I am currently leading an ERASMUS PLUS KA220-HED Grant: Skills and resources for the multimodal turn: Unlocking audiovisual datasets for research and learning (MULTIDATA). I am also the principal investigator of the national research consolidation grant: Modeling the multimodal flow of human communication: language, gesture, and prosody (MULTIFLOW). From 2019 to 2022, I have been the Principal Investigator of the national knowledge-generation grant: Creativity and cognition in the expression of time across modalities (CREATIME), as well as an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow in Quantitative Linguistics at the University of Tübingen, hosted by Professor Harald Baayen. Before that, I was a EURIAS fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies, an FBBVA Leonardo Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and the AHRC project History of Distributed Cognition, University of Edinburgh, a postdoctoral fellow at the Classics Faculty of the University of Oxford (Emotions: The Greek Paradigm, ERC AdG to A. Chaniotis), and a Linguistics-Poetics Tandem Fellow (FRIAS: German Excellence Initiative) at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies. I was also a Marie Curie Fellow at the universities of Murcia, Case Western Reserve, California San Diego, and Oxford. I have supervised postdoctoral researchers (Marie Curie, Juan de la Cierva, or hired by my own grants), MAs, undergraduates, data scientists. I have taught discourse and communication, cognition and poetics, modern Greek, and cognitive linguistics at the undergraduate and graduate level. I was an English teacher at secondary school for seven years. I am an award-winning author of fiction, children's literature, and science popularization in Spanish. PhD in ancient and modern Greek literature, BA+MA in Classics, and BA+MA in English from the University of Murcia. MA in Classics from the University of London, University College London. What does it mean to be human? To contribute to the quest for the human spark, I study our species' unparalleled abilities for weaving networks of meaning that integrate disparate perceptions, thoughts, emotions, and actions into new wholes. With the rest of the team at the Daedalus Lab, I combine methods from the humanities and the sciences to study key integrative phenomena of the human mind: How do we create our concepts, emotions, or aesthetics by building on the basics of perception and action? How do we structure the multimodal flow of communication? How do we stabilize the flashing patterns of our mind through bodily motion and material manipulation? How do we develop all those patterns of integration in cultural diachrony, adapting them to the varying goals and contexts of everyday interactions, social and political goals, artistic and scientific creativity, or cultural tradition?