MLE Friends Talk with Prof Giovanna Colombetti

Giovanna Colombetti is Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Social and Political Sciences, Philosophy, and Anthropology (SPSPA) at the University of Exeter, where she coordinates the interdisciplinary research cluster Mind, Body, and Culture within EGENIS (The Centre for the Study of the Life Sciences). She is also Honorary Adjunct Professor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of Southern Denmark, and serves as co-Editor-in-Chief of Emotion Review, the journal of the International Society for Research on Emotion.

Trained in philosophy and cognitive science, Colombetti works primarily in the philosophy of embodied and situated cognition and in the philosophy of emotion—or, as she prefers to say, of affectivity in its broadest sense. Her teaching and research draw on phenomenology, analytic philosophy, theoretical and experimental psychology, neuroscience, and performance and material-culture studies. In addition to publishing widely in these areas, she has co-authored work with scholars across disciplines including biology, psychology, performance studies (dance and theatre), and even ancient Mesopotamian studies.

A major milestone in her career was being Principal Investigator of an ERC Starting Grant (2010–2014), “Emoting the Embodied Mind” (EMOTER). During this period, she wrote her first book, The Feeling Body: Affective Science Meets the Enactive Mind (MIT Press, 2014), which proposed a new, dynamical and enactivist reconceptualization of affective phenomena. Since then, her research has focused on environmentally situated affectivity, and she has recently completed a book on this topic, titled Feeling With Things: Toward a Theory of Material Affective Scaffolding (forthcoming with MIT Press).