Dr William Short

William Short brings theories of embodied cognition and language to bear on the study of Roman culture, extending Lakoffian metaphor theory to anthropological analysis.  His first monograph, Of Most Erected Spirits (in preparation), takes Latin speakers’ “folk model” of courage and cowardice as a case study of how embodied metaphor helps define Roman culture as a unique signifying order. With Embodiment in Latin Semantics (under contract with John Benjamins), Dr Short will introduce a body of scholarship that illustrates the pervasive role of embodied cognition in Latin speakers’ meaning-making. With Maurizio Bettini, he is also co-editor of Con i Romani (Il Mulino, Nov. 2014), which showcases the emic approach of the Italian school of Roman anthropology.  Dr Short’s journal publications (e.g., “Getting to the Truth”, Arion, 2013, “‘Transmission’ Accomplished?”, AJP, 2013, and “A Roman Folk Model of the Mind”, Arethusa, 2012) have focused on the metaphorical structuring of individual concepts.