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Associate Researchers

Jasmin Richter

Jasmin Richter is a social cognitive psychologist whose research investigates how metacognitive feelings and explicit memory shape individuals’ preferences and convictions. She received her PhD from the University of Cologne and was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oslo, where she joined LCE in 2021. Her work within LCE explores how ease of processing and remembering contribute to factual, moral, and religious beliefs. Her current research also examines how memory processes influence preferences over time, aiming to increase the understanding of how past experiences shape individuals’ likes and dislikes.

Find more information here (researchgate.net) 

Giulia Frigerio

Dr Giulia Frigerio holds a BA in Classical Studies from the University of Pavia that she attended as a scholar of Borromeo College. Subsequently, she moved to Oxford, where she took her MSt in Archaeology. She continued to nourish her passion for this field thanks to a PhD in Classical and Archaeological Studies with a specialization in Cognitive Archaeology at the University of Kent. Dr Frigerio joined the University of Oslo in 2023, where she has been a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow within the project “Female Bodies in Sacred Spaces: Re-evaluating Women’s Agency in the Greek World (FemBod)”. Within the framework of this project, she applied cognitive and gendered approaches to re-evaluate the role of women in classical Greek religion. It was in this context that she became a member of the LCE research group. She is currently a Lecturer at the University of Kent, yet continues to pursue her interest in cognitive archaeology through a new study. This research explores the trust dynamics underlying consultations of the Oracle of Delphi, and considers how these may be compared to contemporary interactions with ChatGPT.

Contact: G.Frigerio@kent.ac.uk

Sarah Bro Trasmundi

Sarah Bro Trasmundi is Associate Professor at the University of Southern Denmark. She is the co-director of CHI – Centre for Human Interactivity, and works with cognitive ethnography and embodied interaction on a large research project "The Ecology of Psychotherapy: Integrating Cognition, Language, and Emotion" (EPICLE). Futhermore, she is currently the P.I. of the research project "How do University Students Read? A Cognitive Ethnography Study", and the director of the Advanced Cognitive Ethnography Lab at Department of Language and Communication. 

Trasmundi joined the LCE team in February 2022, and worked as a LCE researcher until the end of 2024. In January 2025, CHI became a cooperation partner with LCE.  

Find more information here (portal.findresearcher.sdu.dk) 

Yasemin Hacioglu

Yasemin Hacioglu is Associate Professor in English at Volda University College, having defended her PhD, titled "Thinking through Poems: Composition and Decision-Making in Late Eighteenth-Century Women’s Novels," in September 2021 at the University of Oslo. The thesis draws on theories of extended mind and predictive processing to analyse how composition practices in popular gothic and domestic novels model agency to female readers; it is currently being prepared for a monograph. 

Hacioglu is developing the LCE doctoral project on how fiction can model agency to those marginalized by their gender identity through further collaborations with LCE members. She is especially interested in how theories of composition can be expanded to analyse painting practices and Russian nineteenth-century novels. 

Find more information here (hivolda.no) 

Natalia Igl

Natalia Igl is Associate Professor in German-language literature and culture at Østfold University College (hiof). She has a background in German and comparative literature. Her most recent work focuses on strategies of radical reader engagement in multimodal novels, the material of literature and mediality, and reading as inactive and embodied experience. 

As Associated Researcher with LCE, Igl is currently preparing a grant application for funding through the Research Council of Norway (RCN) on embodied and enactive reader engagement in contemporary narratives of illness, trauma, and crisis. The project’s approach and research questions are situated in the centre of LCE’s triangular research focus on ‘Emotions across cultures and languages’, ‘Cultural and cognitive memory’, and ‘Literature as a lifeworld technology’.

Find more information here (hiof.no) 

Lilla Magyari

Lilla Magyari is Associate Professor at the Department of Social Studies at the University of Stavanger (UiS). Since 2020 she has also been a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Reading Centre of UiS, where she works on her MSCA fellowship project, titled “What do we learn from dialogues in fiction?” (FictDial). The project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska Curie grant agreement No. 845343. 

Find more information here (researchgate.net) 

Olivia Fialho

Olivia Fialho is Assistant Professor in Comparative Literature at Utrecht University and Senior Researcher in Empirical and Computational Literary Studies at the Huygens Institute / KNAW (Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences). She has published in the areas of empirical and computational literary studies and literature education. She is the author of Transformative Reading, a scientific model and evidence-based program of literature teaching in education (elementary, secondary, higher education levels), business (leadership), and medical humanities. She is currently working on adapting transformative reading to medical ethics education (funded by the ERC-Advanced grant MORE, 2022–2027) and on a monograph on reading the self as affective literary studies. 
 
Find more information at Utrecht University (uu.nl), at The Huygens Institute (huygens.knaw.nl) and about Fialho's project on transformative reading.

Essi Varis

Essi Varis is a postdoctoral researcher funded by The Finnish Cultural Foundation and affiliated with the University of Helsinki's department of English Philology. Her background is in literary and comics studies, and she took special interest in cognitive theories during her doctoral work at the University of Jyväskylä. Her compilation dissertation Graphic Human Experiments: Frankensteinian Cognitive Logics of Characters in Vertigo Comics and Beyond (jyx.jyu.fi, 2019) suggested a new cognitive theory for understanding multimodal and intertextual characters. Currently, Varis investigates how speculation and imagination are enabled and extended by different kinds of texts and images. Her two-year visit with LCE (2021–2023) is hosted by professor Karin Kukkonen.

In addition to cognitive narratology and comics, Varis' research interests include art-based methodologies and speculative fiction. She is also an editor-in-chief of Fafnir – Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research (journal.finfar.org) and practices Japanese, visual arts and creative writing on her free time.

Find more information here (orcid.org)

Alexandra Effe

Mats Haraldsen

Partner Centre 

• Centre for Human Interactivity (Odense, DK)

Cooperation with groups and centrers

• SENSE–READ (Stavanger, NO)
• The Cognitive Lab (Stavanger, NO) 
• Interacting Minds Centre (Aarhus, DK)
• Literature and Emotions group (Helsinki, FI)
• Utrecht Forum for Memory Studies (Utrecht, NL) 
• CogLit group, (Ghent with connection to NARMESH and SEL, BE)
• Max Planck-Institute for Empirical Aesthetics (Frankfurt, DE)
• The Frankfurt Memory Studies platform (Frankfurt, DE)
• Cognitive Literary Studies (Aachen, DE)
• Cognition and Poetics (Osnabrück, DE)
• NewHums (Catania, IT)
• Culture, Translation and Cognition (Lisbon, PT)
• Science / Literature (Paris III, with connection to Épistémocritique, FR),
• Centre for Digital Culture (Birmingham, with connection to Ambient Literature (UK)
• Hearing the Voice (Durham, UK)
• Reading Other Minds (Oxford, UK)
• Literature and the Mind (Santa Barbara, US)
• Experimental Humanities Lab (Indiana, US)
• Mind, Brain, Evolution and Culture (Macquarie, AUS)
• Digital Humanities Lab (Basel, CH)
• EmoCNet (Rijeka, HRV)
• Narrative, Culture and Cognition (University of Tartu, EE)

Outreach Partners

• Litteratur på Blå

For further information on the visiting scholarships, please get in touch.