Lera Boroditsky

Listen to a conversation about the inter-relationships between world languages and human thinking

From Stanford University’s

Entitled Opinions

Host Robert Harrison

Tuesday, November 4, 5:00 pm - 6:00 pm, 2008
Guest host Joshua Landy in conversation with Lera Boroditsky about language and thought.

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JOSHUA LANDY is Associate Professor of French at Stanford University. He has written Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception, and Knowledge in Proust (Oxford, 2004) and has edited, with Thomas Pavel and Claude Bremond, Thematics: New Approaches (SUNY, 1994). This is his first appearance as host of Entitled Opinions. He was a guest of the show in 2005, discussing Marcel Proust with Robert Harrison.

LERA BORODITSKY is an assistant professor of psychology, neuroscience, and symbolic systems at Stanford University. Dr. Boroditsky grew up in Minsk in the former Soviet Union. After earning a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Stanford in 2001, she served on the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the Department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences before returning to a faculty position at Stanford. She also runs a satellite laboratory in Jakarta, Indonesia.

Boroditsky’s research centers on the nature of mental representation and how knowledge emerges out of the interactions of mind, world, and language. One focus has been to investigate the ways that languages and cultures shape human thinking. To this end, Boroditsky’s laboratory has collected data around the world, from Indonesia to Chile to Turkey to Aboriginal Australia. Her research has been widely featured in the media and has won multiple awards, including the CAREER award from the National Science Foundation and the Searle Scholars award.