Przemysław Żywiczyński
Bio:
Przemysław Żywiczyński is Professor of Linguistics at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń and Director of NCU’s Institute of Advanced Studies. His research explores how human communication begins, changes, and becomes shared – especially through gesture and pantomime.
He has long been interested in the borderland between language, body, mind, and culture. Much of his recent work investigates improvised communication: how people use gesture when they cannot rely on speech, and how repeated interaction can gradually give rise to communicative conventions. In his experimental studies, he uses motion-capture methods to examine how bodily movement becomes meaningful.
He is co-founder and former head of the Centre for Language Evolution Studies at NCU, which has developed into an interdisciplinary and internationally visible research group bringing together linguistics, philosophy, psychology, evolutionary biology, literature studies, and cognitive archaeology. His work has appeared in journals such as Journal of Language Evolution, Language & Communication, Interaction Studies, Cognitive Science, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, and Language & Cognition. He is also co-editor of Perspectives on Pantomime.
Institute of Advanced Studies is above all a place for intellectual hospitality: a space where scholars from different fields can slow down, listen carefully, and discover that the most interesting questions often emerge between disciplines.
