MPI-Nijmegen searches for new director

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The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, is looking for a director to head a new department there. They've done something novel, had an open call and an open workshop series with invited speakers related to this director search. Below is the list of invited speakers and talks they've given in the workshop series which has now come to an end. Looking at the invitees and talk titles is a nice way to see how the institute sees the future of the field of psychology of language. As this blog started at this institute, I figured I'd share this here in case it's interesting for people following this account.

From MPI-Nijmegen website:
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The Max Planck Society is about to start the process of finding a new director for a new department at the MPI for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen. The directors of the institute have identified that the field of Psychology of Language remains a core area that distinctly and uniquely covers a research area integral to our institute’s mission.

To discuss in more detail the promising developments in this field and to guide the search procedure, we plan a series of afternoon workshops with the title “The future of the Psychology of Language”. Psychology of Language should in this case be broadly construed. Classically, research in this area has investigated how complex language skills such as signing, speaking, listening, and reading are organised, acquired, and executed in real time by the human mind/brain. Recently the quest has been extended in multiple directions including, but not limited to the role of language in the cognitive architecture of the human mind, recognising that language does not operate in isolation but interfaces with other cognitive and social systems; language adaptation across time and space, recognising that language is a dynamic and flexible system that adapts to variation at multiple levels; analysis of how linguistic representations are encoded in neural activity; and the use of computational models to implement, test and generate new hypotheses and formal theories in humans and machines.
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They organised 4 workshops containing job-talks for potential directors.
List of invited speakers in workshop series and talk titles:
  • Andrea Martin, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
    • Title of talk: Beyond static structure and meaning: Towards an explanatory, dynamic psycholinguistics
  • Dirk Wulff, Max Planck Institute for Human Development
    • Title of the talk: Language as the foundation of cognitive science
  • Jonas Obleser, University of Lübeck
    • Title of talk: Language in Noisy Minds: Multiple Facets of Uncertainty in Human Communication
  • Inbal Arnon, University of Edinburgh
    • Title of talk: Representation, Learning, Evolution: Expanding horizons for studying the psychology of language
  • Katrien Segaert, University of Birmingham
    • Title of talk: Harnessing variation to maximise theoretical rigor and societal relevance
  • Floris de Lange, Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour
    • Title of talk: What are the building blocks of language? 
  • Paula Rubio-Fernández, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
    • Title of talk: Cultural evolutionary pragmatics: Investigating the interdependence of language and social cognition
  • Vitória Piai, Radboud University
    • Title of talk: Studying language dysfunction: Part of the interdisciplinary approach
  • Julian Jara-Ettinger, Yale University
    • Title of talk: Inside the loop: language, cognition, and how to study them
  • Nadine Gaab, Harvard Graduate School of Education
    • Title of the talk: From the womb to the classroom: How a neurobiological framework of early language and reading development can Inform educational practice and policy 
  • Reyna Gordon, Vanderbilt University
    • Title of talk: Understanding the connections between Language, Musicality, and Health through an Integrative Science Approach

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