Project Team

Miranda Anderson is the initiator of, and a research fellow on, the History of Distributed Cognition Project. This project expands on research completed during her Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship which explores parallels (and contrasts) between recent philosophical theories on the extended mind and analogous ideas in literary, philosophical, and scientific texts circulating between the fifteenth and early-seventeenth century. A number of papers on this research have been published or are forthcoming and her book The Renaissance Extended Mind was published by Palgrave Macmillan's New Directions in Philosophy and Cognitive Science series in July 2015.

She was a Research Associate of The Balzan Project, which was based at St John’s College, University of Oxford, and which explored cognitive approaches to literary studies. She also initiated and became a research fellow on the ongoing AHRC-funded project Palimpsest: Literary Edinburgh, now renamed LitLong, a project which arose out of her idea of creating an innovative new way of engaging people with literature through geolocating extracts of literary texts. 

Douglas Cairns was appointed to the Chair of Classics at Edinburgh in 2003, having previously worked at the Universities of St Andrews, Otago, Leeds, and Glasgow. He is the author of Aidôs: The Psychology and Ethics of Honour and Shame in Ancient Greek Literature (1993), Bacchylides: Five Epinician Odes (2010), and Sophocles: Antigone (2015), and has edited or co-edited a number of volumes on Greek literature, thought, and society. The most recent of these are Vision and Viewing in Ancient Greece (with Sue Blundell and Nancy Rabinowitz, 2013), Tragedy and Archaic Greek Thought (2013), Defining Greek Narrative (with Ruth Scodel, 2014), and Emotions between Greece and Rome (with Laurel Fulkerson, 2015). He is currently working on the role of metaphor in ancient Greek concepts of emotion.

Peter Garratt is a lecturer in the Department of English Studies at Durham University, with research interests in Victorian literature and culture; literature, science and medicine; and the cognitive turn in the humanities. His book Victorian Empiricism was published in 2010. He has published on Victorian writers such as John Ruskin, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Charles Dickens. He is the founding coordinator of the AHRC network ‘Cognitive Futures in the Humanities’, and a member of the executive committee of the British Society for Literature and Science.

Mark Sprevak is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy of Mind at the University of Edinburgh. His primary research interests are in philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, metaphysics, with particular focus on the cognitive sciences. His current research centres on 2 main projects: (1) the embodied, extended, and distributed turn in cognitive science (considering, for example, whether cognition extends beyond the head, and what implications this has for scientific practice); (2) philosophical issues arising from using computation to explain the mind (evaluating, for example, the status of this kind of explanation compared to other forms of scientific explanation). He has published articles in, among other places, The Journal of Philosophy, The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Synthese, Philosophy, Psychiatry & Psychology, The Monist, and Studies in History and Philosophy of Science. His book, The Computational Mind, is forthcoming from Routledge.