Cristóbal Pagán, a research fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society, completed a research stay within the English Department of the University of Heidelberg (Germany) during July and August, 2014.

During this research stay, the Public Discourse fellow worked with Beatrix Busse, Professor in the English Department and Vice Chancellor for Teaching at the University of Heidelberg (Germany). "Professor Busse is organizing an interdisciplinary initiative on the notion of patterns in the arts and sciences, which is very much related to my research," Pagán affirmed. His project is called SCHEMOTIME (Schematic Conceptual Integrations for Time and Emotion in Language, Literature, and Gesture) and it analyses the relationship between patterns and creativity in discourse.

"Busse's interdisciplinary initiative is very ambitious and tries to connect with people from different faculties; initial meetings have already taken place," the scholar stated. The research stay aimed to find commonalities between the two research projects and study the possibility of designing joint strategies. "We hope to determine exactly what kind of dialogue we want," Pagán explained "and see if we can compare our project results with their reflections on how the notion of patterns generally works.

A double research stay

Besides visiting the English Department of the University of Heidelberg, Cristóbal Pagán was also invited to visit the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, which aims to study the aesthetic experience. "They seek to understand the cognitive and neural processes underlying the appreciation of aesthetic objectives and the recognition of something as poetic, musical or aesthetic," Pagán clarified.

Cristóbal Pagán is a researcher fellow within the Public Discourse project of the Institute for Culture and Society. He holds a PhD in Classics and a degree in English from the University of Murcia. In 2009, he was awarded a Marie Curie Grant that afforded him the opportunity to carry out research on cognitive patterns in poetry at Case Western Reserve University (USA), the University of California San Diego (USA) and the University of Oxford (UK), among other institutions.