Alan Cienki (PhD, Brown University, USA) is professor of Language Use & Cognition and English linguistics in the School of Humanities at VU Amsterdam and is personnel manager of ALP-English. He has taught BA and MA courses in English language and communication at the VU since 2006 as well as courses for the Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics (LOT). Before that, he worked at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, USA, where he co-founded and directed the Program in Linguistics.
His research is based in cognitive linguistics and focusses on issues of what language use reveals about processes of conceptualization, with special attention to the use of metaphor and grammatical constructions from the perspectives of comparative and contrastive linguistics. Alan is director of the MA specialization at the VU in Multimodal Communication.