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Majid appointed Professor of Language, Communication, and Cultural Cognition

As of September 1, 2012, Asifa Majid has been appointed Professor of Language, Communication, and Cultural Cognition at the Center for Language Studies, Radboud University Nijmegen. She will be running her NWO Vici Grant on human olfaction at the intersection of language, culture and biology. Majid is researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour in Nijmegen.
Majid appointed Professor of Language, Communication, and Cultural Cognition

Photo Paul Breuker.

September 4, 2012 

Why is language good at describing some aspects of the world (e.g. the spatial relationships between objects) but limited in describing others (e.g. faces such that we can identify them)? This is one of the central questions of Majid's research, which investigates the nature of categories and concepts in language, in non-linguistic perception and cognition, and the relationship between them, she says on her personal pages.

Majid studied psychology with philosophy at the University of Glasgow from 1992 to 1996. In 1997 she received her Master's in Cognitive Science and Natural Language at the University of Edinburgh. She then became a researcher at the University of Glasgow, where she defended her PhD in 2001.

Visiting scholar

She was a visiting scholar at the Universities of Massachusetts, Western Ontario, Columbia New York and the Max Planck Institutes of Berlin and Nijmegen. Since 2001, she works at the MPI for Psycholinguistics, first as Marie Curie post-doctoral fellow but since 2004 as scientific staff member and later senior investigator. Since 2010, she is Research Fellow at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour. She conducted fieldwork in Malaysia and Pakistan.

Majid is also an Invited Fellow to the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study. She will be spending the autumn semester in Uppsala and will be back in Nijmegen mid-December.

Also see MPI's news item about Majid's Vici Grant.

Asifa.Majid@mpi.nl

Last checked 2012-10-30 by Myrna Tinbergen
Max Planck Institute
About MPI

 

The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics is an institute of the German Max Planck Society. Our mission is to undertake basic research into the psychological,social and biological foundations of language. The goal is to understand how our minds and brains process language, how language interacts with other aspects of mind, and how we can learn languages of quite different types.

The institute is situated on the campus of the Radboud University. We participate in the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, and have particularly close ties to that institute's Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging. We also participate in the Centre for Language Studies. A joint graduate school, the IMPRS in Language Sciences, links the Donders Institute, the CLS and the MPI.

 

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