Online talk: Comics and Cognition - The Power of Visual Thinking with Neil Cohn and Nick Sousanis
- Date
- Thursday 22 February 2024, 3:00pm
- Location
- Online
You're warmly invited to the third LAHRI Sadler event on comics and interdisciplinarity, hosted by Miriam Kent, Eirini Boukla and Rik Worth. It features Neil Cohn (Tilburg University) and Nick Sousanis (San Francisco State University) in conversation on the topic of comics, cognition and visual thinking. Booking is essential.
This conversational talk will draw from the far-reaching disciplines of cognitive science, linguistics and epistemology, bringing together two world-leading comics scholars. Comics are often perceived as solely a narrative form, and yet the ways in which disparate elements work together on the page offer a capacity for meaning-making that transcends presenting illustrations for written narrative. Both broadly concerned with the burgeoning study of “visual thinking,” Nick Sousanis and Neil Cohn will discuss the integration of comics into their scholarly practice and the impact this has had on their research and teaching. Their work is testament to the power of comics to defy traditional modes of thinking and knowledge generation.Please note that this is an online event. Registration is essential as details for attendance will be circulated only to attendees. The event will take place on Zoom and will be recorded. The talk will begin at 3pm UK time / 4pm Central European Time / 10am Eastern Standard Time and is expected to be 1 hour in duration.
About the Contributors
Neil Cohn is a cognitive scientist and comics theorist, and Associate Professor at the Center for Cognition and Communication at Tilburg University. His work focuses on the cognitive processes that influence the interpretation of sequential artforms to better understand how readers make sense of visual content. He currently leads the Visual Language Lab research group, which carried out linguistic and cognitive research on visual language and multimodality.
Nick Sousanis is an Eisner-winning comics author and an Associate Professor of Humanities & Liberal Studies at San Francisco State University, where he started and runs a Comics Studies programme. In Unflattening (Harvard University Press, 2015), Sousanis presents his innovative comics research in the form of a comic book.