By 
College of Humanities and Social Sciences
University of Edinburgh
miranda.anderson@ed.ac.uk
2017 Cruciblist
Miranda Anderson is a Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh and the initiator of the AHRC-funded project, ‘A History of Distributed Cognition’ (HDC).
Recently claims have been made in philosophy of mind and cognitive science that rather than being entirely brain-based or purely metaphysical, the mind is distributed or extended across the brain, body and world. The HDC project explores the history of this notion through an examination of philosophical, scientific and cultural works from classical antiquity to the mid-twentieth century and we have a four volume series forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press (2018).
The project expands on the research interests of her book, The Renaissance Extended Mind (2015), which was the outcome of a Leverhulme Trust Fellowship, and which explores parallels (and contrasts) between recent philosophical theories about the extended mind and analogous ideas in philosophical, scientific and cultural works circulating between the fifteenth and early-seventeenth century.
Miranda was the initiator of Palimpsest as a prototype and of the AHRC-funded project ‘Palimpsest: Literary Edinburgh’ on which she then became a Research Fellow. The outcome of this project was a web and mobile device that enables users to access geolocated extracts of fictional and historical texts set in Edinburgh: http://litlong.org/.
Miranda combines specialization in Medieval and Renaissance literary, philosophical, and scientific texts, with a broader interest in investigating paradigms of the human mind and self across disciplinary and historical spans, along with related ethical issues.
More generally, her recent publications examine relations between research in philosophy of mind and cognitive science and in the arts and humanities, and considers the ways in which these disciplines can inform each other. She is also interested in how the digital humanities can contribute to our reading of literary texts, particularly in terms of assessing the attribution of aesthetic qualities.