Invited Speakers

I am a professor in the Cognitive Science Institute at Osnabrück University. My research areas are Semantics, Pragmatics and Psycholinguistics/Neurolinguistics. I lead the SPA Lab, which is partly funded by the DFG Emmy Noether program. Visit my lab's website for more information. Before coming to Osnabrück University, I was a group leader at the University of Potsdam, I held a replacement professorship at Humboldt University (Berlin) and a postdoc position at ZAS (Berlin), funded by the Priority Program Xprag.de. I was a visiting researcher at Macquarie University (Sydney) and Stanford (Palo Alto). Currently, I am an honorary fellow at UCL (London) and Ulster University (Belfast). I am the editor-in-chief of Palgrave Studies in Pragmatics, Language and Cognition and a member of the Editorial Board of Glossa: Psycholinguistics.

Much of my work thus far has been in the field of moral cognition. I examine the ways in which people’s moral judgments can influence their use of concepts that might initially seem entirely scientific or non-moral (intention, causation, happiness, knowledge). I have also worked on a number of questions about people’s ordinary concepts that fall outside the domain of moral cognition strictly speaking, including questions about people’s understanding of free will and of consciousness.

I am a Professor at the Centre for Cognitive Science of the University of Neuchâtel. My current work lies in the interdisciplinary field of pragmatics, which explores language and communication from a cognitive perspective. Currently, I am the Principal Investigator of the SNSF Eccellenza Grant "Pragmatics meets epistemic vigilance: Explaining the development of irony comprehension" (2020-2025). I am also a member of the NCCR Evolving Language. In this context, I work on storytelling and the role of language in fostering human hypercooperation.