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prof. dr. Alan Cienki

Full Professor, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, Language

Full Professor, Network Institute

Personal information

Professor of Language Use & Cognition and English Linguistics
(Hoogleraar Taalgebruik & Cognitie en Engelse Taalkunde)

Personnel Manager, English Academic Language Programme

President (2025–27), International Society for Gesture Studies

Founder of the 
Multimodal Communication and Cognition Lab ("Polimod")
at the Centre for Socio-Cognitive Discourse Studies ("SCoDis"),
Moscow State Linguistic University, Russian Federation

Research

Cognitive linguistics; semantics and conceptualization; gesture studies; multimodal communication; grammar of spoken language; metaphor studies; comparative/contrastive linguistics

Grants

Selection:
Visiting professor, Dept. of Letters and Philosophy, University of Florence, Italy (April 2026)
Netherlands Science Foundation/NWO (2012-16, 2025-present)
PhD candidates via China Scholarship Council (2012-2024)
Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (2009-10, 2024)
Russian Science Foundation (2014-16, 2017-18, 2019-21)
Cinepoetics, FU Berlin (2016)

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Publications

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Research/publications Amsterdam UMC
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