Barbara Dancygier

Barbara Dancygier is a Professor in the Department of English Language and Literatures within the Faculty of Arts at the University of British Columbia. She holds the prestigious title of Distinguished University Scholar and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (FRSC). Her academic journey began with MA and PhD degrees from the Institute of English Studies at the University of Warsaw, followed by a Fulbright Scholarship at UC Berkeley, and positions at both the University of Warsaw and Simon Fraser University before joining UBC.

Dancygier is a leading cognitive linguist whose primary research focuses on conceptual viewpoint, conceptual metaphor theory, blending, and construction grammar as applied to meaning-related phenomena in grammar and discourse. She has made significant contributions to cognitive poetics, particularly in the analysis of fictional narratives and drama. Her recent work extends to multimodal contexts, examining viewpoint in visual artifacts like street art, posters, ads, and digital discourse. Her current SSHRC-funded project investigates 'Emotional Dissonance and the Post-Truth Crisis,' analyzing expressions of epistemic and emotional stance in contemporary media discourse.

Dancygier has authored five scholarly books, including The Language of Stories: A Cognitive Approach (2012) and Figurative Language (2014, co-authored with Eve Sweetser), and has edited several influential collections such as The Cambridge Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics (2017). Her extensive publication record includes over forty scholarly articles on linguistic phenomena like conditionals, negation, proper names, and the concept of viewpoint across various communicative contexts.

• Killam Research Prize recipient
• Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies (2012)
• Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Study at Durham University, UK (2015)
• Active collaborator with MIDI research group at KU Leuven and LCE interdisciplinary hub at University of Oslo

In teaching, Dancygier focuses on the Department's Language Program, particularly courses that explore linguistic meaning from a cognitive linguistics perspective rather than formal semantics. She teaches ENGL 327 (Cognitive Approaches to the Study of Meaning) and ENGL 328 (Metaphor, Language, and Thought), welcoming graduate students interested in cognitive poetics, language, narratives, and multimodal artifacts. She is actively engaged with two international research networks: the MIDI research group at KU Leuven (Multimodality, Interaction and Discourse) and the LCE interdisciplinary hub at the University of Oslo (Literature, Cognition and Emotions).