With an almost finished book manuscript for Creativity and Contingency in my suitcase, I visited colleagues at the Universities of Stirling, Sussex and Edinburgh for an in-depth exchange on the model I had developed for understanding creativity in literary writing.
At the University of Stirling, I was hosted as a visiting researcher by Michael Wheeler in the Philosophy Department. In regular meetings, we discussed an outline of my theoretical model, chapter drafts, as well as shared readings, which was enormously helpful in clarifying my book’s theoretical investments in embodied and extended cognition. Exchanges with John Sutton around his work on embodied skill and expertise helped me approach the issue of an author’s expertise from the embodied perspective.
Reading Recommendation:
- Ali Smith, Companion Piece.
I presented a chapter from my book at a shared seminar between English Literature and Languages and Philosophy at the University of Stirling, organised by Rebecca De Souza and Michael Wheeler under the title “Creativity and the Contingency of Language: The Case of Multi-Lingual Writers”. An audience of specialists in translation studies, literary studies as well as philosophy posed encouraging and helful questions.
Reading recommendation:
- Kate Briggs, This Little Art.
At the University of Edinburgh, Mark Sprevak engaged me in a conversation on computational creativity, which gave good impulses for my take on generative fiction and the place that large language models should take in models of creativity and cognition. He also organised a session of the PPIGs seminar (Philosophy, Psychology and Informatics Group), where I presented a paper on my overall theoretical model.
Reading recommendation:
- Italo Calvino, “The Count of Monte-Christo” (Cosmicomics).
At the University of Sussex, I visited Andy Clark to discuss recent developments in predictive processing, a theoretical model that also underpins my understanding of creativity. I presented my work in the COGS seminar (Cognitive Sciences Centre) to an audience of philosophers and cognitive scientists.
My stay was highly productive and enjoyable. While storm Ciaran gave the British phrase “inclement weather” a new degree of understatement, my project was propelled towards its conclusion by putting the finishing touches on the theoretical model and its links to philsophy and cognitive sciences.