On Tuesday 9 December, 15.45 hrs, in the Aula of the VU University, Gerard Steen will hold his valedictory lecture on the occasion of his departure from the VU and move to the UvA. Professor Steen is the founding director of the Metaphor Lab and has been managing director of the Language, Cognition and Communication group at the Faculty of Humanities, both of which participate in the Network Institute. With this move to the UvA, the Metaphor Lab will become a pan-Amsterdam research center while remaining affiliated with the Network Institute, with researchers from the Network Institute of VUA and the Amsterdam Center for Language and Communication of UvA collaborating on metaphor research across the humanities and the sciences. For more information, go to www.Metaphorlab.org.

The title of professor Steen’s lecture is ‘From philology to network science: 39 years of language and communication at VUA’. The talk will give a brief impression of one kind of research done in the Metaphor Lab, then continue with a broader view of research done in the Language and Communication group that is connected to the chair, and then branch out to the position of this type of research in the humanities and network science. Against the background of the threats posed to the humanities in the Netherlands in general, the lecture will call for a balanced and targeted view of the opportunities for language and communication researchers in the Network Institute and the larger VU program called ‘Connected World.’

An interview with professor Steen about the work he has done on metaphor and language and communication has recently appeared in Review of Cognitive Linguistics (see http://metaphorlab.vu.nl/en/index.asp).