Joost Schilperoord Ph.D. has been a professor at Tilburg University since 1999. He received his PhD in Communication sciences and Linguistics at Utrecht University. His interests gradually shifted from psycholinguistics to visual and multimodal language and communication, particularly focusing on the rhetorics and cognition of visual genres like advertising and editorial cartoons, i.e. metaphorical conceptualization in visual expressions, visual incongruities, irony and hyperboles, and (visual) optimal innovation. Together with Neil Cohn he has been developing a cognitive linguistic model of multimodality. 

Ana Krajinović, Ph.D. is a linguist with an interdisciplinary mindset and passion for comics and visual storytelling. Her curiosity about language diversity took her from describing the grammar of the Malabar Indo-Portuguese creole (MA thesis and book) to fieldwork in Vanuatu. Based on her fieldwork on Nafsan, a Southern Oceanic language, Ana researched the typology of linguistic categories of perfect aspect, as in present/past perfect in English, and irrealis mood, similar to the subjunctive. Ana holds an MA from the University of Lisbon and a joint PhD degree from the Humboldt University of Berlin and the University of Melbourne. She worked as a postdoc at the Heinrich Heine University of Düsseldorf since 2020, where she has expanded her ideas about language to multimodal communication with internet memes. She studies how the meanings of viral exploitable memes evolve to become more abstract, parallel to the processes of grammaticalization in language. In her free time, Ana writes and draws (and learns how to draw) comics about neurodivergence and other topics. (Website)

Irmak Hacımusaoğlu M.Sc. is a Ph.D. student at Tilburg University and a doodle artist. She holds a MSc degree in Cognitive Neuropsychology (Research) from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (2019). Her master’s research combined behavioral and electrophysiological (EEG) approaches about false memory generations in educational settings. She received her BA in Psychology (magna cum laude) with a specialization in Brain & Cognitive Sciences from Koç University, 2017. Her primary research in the TINTIN Project relates to motion events and space-time relationships. She is fascinated by the intersect between neuroscience and humanities and has become a member of NeuroGenderings Network. (Twitter)

Bien Klomberg M.Sc. is a Ph.D. student at Tilburg University, excited to combine her lifelong love for stories and linguistics with an equally long passion for drawing and comics. Her bachelors at University College Roosevelt, Middelburg focused on stylistics, rhetorics, literature, and cognitive linguistics, with figurative language and point of view as special interests, leading her to co-author the book Picturing Fiction through Embodied Cognition (Routledge, 2022). Her masters in Communication and Cognition at Tilburg University focused on inferencing techniques in visual narratives. Her PhD is focusing on (dis)continuity in visual narrative sequencing, particularly in mappings across domains. She enjoys mixing craft with science, still draws, and loves stories in written form as well as Netflix series. (Website)

Lenneke Lichtenberg is a Research Master student studying Linguistics and Communication Sciences at Tilburg University. She is interested in the processing of information across different modalities in neurocognition. During her bachelor Communication and Information Sciences, she specialized in Cognition and Communication. Her honors bachelor’s thesis focused on the processing of visual morphology of upfixes, focusing on their literal and symbolic/metaphoric meanings. She plans to learn more about EEG research and conduct EEG experiments in the future. After her Research Master’s, she hopes to pursue a PhD in (Neuro)Cognition and Communication sciences. (Twitter)

Aditya Upadhyayula, Ph.D. (Washington University, St. Louis) is a postdoctoral fellow working with Jeff Zacks on the perception of events. Prior to pursuing a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology, he was trained as an Electrical and Computer Engineer, and a Physicist. He loves walking, cooking, and playing the guitar and the piano. He once made traditional South Indian potato fries with Italian seasoning (Although ironic, he maintains that it was delicious). He is often seeing going on long walks wondering how he has ended up pursuing cognitive psychology. Nevertheless, he is happy to be studying how the mind works. He is very interested in building and using computational models to understand human cognition. (Website, Twitter)

Marianna Pagkratidou, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor in Psychology at Dublin City University (DCU; Ireland, Dublin). She graduated with a Ph.D. in Cognitive and Experimental Psychology from the University of Cyprus. Marianna’s research focuses on spatial memory representations that are constructed through narratives, specifically through comics and is also interested in the role of comics in education. (Website, Twitter)

Morgan Patrick is an Assistant Professor at Elon University. He received his Ph.D. in music theory and cognition from Northwestern University. He is interested in the interface between musical form, broadly construed, and aspects of narrative grammar. This work involves three areas of inquiry: affective dynamics, structural parallels, and attentional processes involved the analysis and cognition of temporal structures. (Website coming soon)

Maki Miyamoto (Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology Japan) is a Ph.D student in Knowledge Science at JAIST. She is a visiting PhD student at Visual Language Lab in Tilburg University from September 2023 to August 2024. She is interested in communication by ‘language’ and her original interest comes from ideophones or onomatopoeia in comics/manga. She has two simple questions: (1) Can people understand or feel sounds or states of things by seeing a scene of comic/manga even if they do not have knowlege of the language used in the comic/manga? (2) Do people who are sharing the same language actually understand or feel same sounds or states of things when they see the same scene of comic/manga? If they do, why they can do? Her master’s research focused on these questions, and she has investigated communicability of Japanese ideophone sounds to non-Japanese speakers from the view of sound symbolism. In her Ph.D research, she aim to understand what people can know through ideophones in comic/manga.

Bruno Cardoso Ph.D. was a Postdoctoral Researcher (2020-2023) at Tilburg University and the creator of the Multimodal Annotation Software Tool (MAST) for the TINTIN project. His research interests are focused on the field of Human-Computer Interaction, specifically topics of emotion, usability, context-awareness in mobile devices and domain-specific languages. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science at the Nova University of Lisbon (Lisbon, Portugal). A pretty eclectic person, Bruno loves learning new things, science, technology (emphasis on all things computer) and culture. (Website)

Fernando Casanova (University of Murcia, Spain) graduated with his PhD sponsored by a FPU scholarship granted by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Culture. He holds two degrees in Language Sciences (Spanish, English and French) and an MA in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics. His doctoral thesis focused on interjections and onomatopoeias, their emotions, and the co-speech body and facial gestures they incorporate. He is fascinated by the psychological and cognitive connection of emotions and gestures to express all kinds of information and that allows us to communicate in an efficient way.

Ian Joo associate professor at the Otaru University of Commerce. His primary interest is linguistic typology, with two specific interests: are iconicity (How can linguistic form resemble linguistic meaning?) and areality (How do different geographical areas show different linguistic patterns?). He also built the Phonotacticon database, consisting of basic phonotactic information of hundreds of Eurasian languages. (Website, Twitter)

Ekaterina (Katja) Varkentin is a PhD student in Perception and Action Lab in Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien (IWM) in Tübingen, Germany. Her research interests lie in exploring the cognitive and psychological processes involved in generating bridging inferences, specifically examining how individuals connect elements of a pictorial story or comic when part of the narrative is absent. To gain a thorough understanding of the processes, which closely resemble real-world scenarios, she investigates them across different age groups and after stress induction in her experiments.

Sharitha van der Gouw M.Sc. served as the “lab manager” for the TINTIN Project, and has an interest in visual storytelling and illustration. Her Masters in New Media Design at Tilburg University focused on analyzing domain usage in American and Japanese comic styles, which she continued in her work in the TINTIN Project. She currently works in information technology at Tilburg University.