Fiona Post by Catherine We at the excd.lab are a highly interdisciplinary bunch, with backgrounds spanning anthropology, linguistics, psychology, philosophy, music, biology, and statistics. Nowhere is this more evident than in our weekly journal club, where we come together (in an archaeology laboratory!) to discuss cultural evolution and learn more about each other’s areas of research. … Read more
Over summer, lab members have been super-busy on their various projects, taking advantage of the quiet(er) environment out of the teaching term. In the autumn, we have PhD upgrades, submissions, and vivas; papers to submit; some lab members to farewell (boo), and excitingly, a number of folk will be presenting at the Inaugural Cultural … Read more
Last week, the excd.lab sent a team to “Big Bang Bristol“, a two day science, technology, engineering, and maths extravaganza. Guest post by Shakti Puri & Lucy Harries. The fair had the purpose of introducing children to research through hands-on experiments, activities, and live demonstrations. Our stall, entitled the ‘Science of Culture’, consisted of … Read more
Today we welcomed two new members of the lab as Summer Research Interns. Shakti Puri and Lucy Harries have both just finished their final year as Modern Languages students and will be with us for four weeks over the summer working on bringing D-PLACE to the wider public. … Read more
As part of the British Academy International Partnership Mobility award that enabled Josh Birchall from the Museu Goeldi to visit us back in October, Fiona is currently in Belém, Brazil to meet with collaborators on an incipient comparative database of South American language and kinship. As part of her trip, Fiona gave a talk on “As dinâmicas da diversidade cultural e … Read more
As the new year dawns, we welcome two new members to the excd.lab: Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow Sean Roberts joins us from a postdoc position in the Language and Cognition group at the MPI Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands. His research is in evolutionary linguistics and statistical approaches to modelling cross-cultural data. He’ll be with us … Read more
As part of the Varikin project, we are able to host visiting researchers who are funded by the National Science Foundation in the United States; the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning in South Korea; the Ministry of Science, Technology and Productive Innovationin Argentina; the Society for the Promotion of Science in Japan; the National … Read more
UK/EU students interested in applying for the AHRC South, West and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership (SWW DTP), a funding scheme for PhD students in the arts and humanities, are invited to attend the SWW DTP Information Day on November 28 in Cardiff. Registration is free but must be completed by November 13: https://swwdtp.fluidreview.com/. Students interested in … Read more
1. We welcomed Sam Passmore and Simon Bishop as new PhD students in the lab. Sam will be working on the Varikin-Evolution project and Simon on cultural adjustment in overseas students at the University of Bristol. 2. We are excited to host Joshua Birchall from the Museu Goeldi in Belém, Brazil, for three weeks as part … Read more
1. We welcomed Dr Alice Mitchell and Dr Catherine Sheard to the VariKin project. Alice will be working on VariKin-Development, studying children’s understanding of kinship relations in Bristol and Tanzania, and Catherine will be working on Varikin-Evolution and providing admin support. 2. Fiona, Alice, and Peter are at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology … Read more