Louise Barrett

IAS Fellow at Hatfield College, October - December 2024

Contact Details

• Home Institution email: louise.barrett@uleth.ca
• Durham email:
• Durham Tel: 

Louise Barrett was trained as an ecologist and anthropologist at University College London, UK. Following her PhD, Professor Barrett took up a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of KwaZulu Natal, before returning to increasingly senior posts in the UK, and a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship. In 2007 she moved to the University of Lethbridge, where she is Professor of Psychology and Canada Research Chair (Tier I) in Evolution, Cognition and Behaviour, and she was elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society of Canada in 2016. She has run two long-term field studies on baboons and vervet monkeys in South Africa, that have explored the complexities of social life and its potential links to the evolution of brain size and social intelligence. She has presented her work in four books, including Beyond the Brain: How Body and Environment Shape Animal and Human Minds, and over a hundred journal articles, which stretch from the embodied nature of animal cognition to challenges of constructing a non-reductive evolutionary account of human behaviour. She has given over 50 invited presentations internationally, including 14 plenary and four keynote lectures at all the major conferences in her fields of research. She was, for five years, the executive editor of Animal Behaviour, and she is currently Editor-in-Chief of the journal, Behavioural Ecology.  

As an IAS Visiting Fellow, Professor Barrett will be participating in the Syntactical Structures and the Evolution of Mind and Culture project, working with Professor Rob Barton and Professor Zanna Clay to address the topic of serial ordering within cognitive science and comparative psychology in order to rethink some of these fields’ fundamental concepts and ontologies. In particular, she will consider how a focus on “4E cognition” offers a means to expand the theory of serial ordering and syntax, and its role in cognitive evolution. This will build on her recent work investigating the manner in which human psychological concepts are applied to other species, via a process of translation and interpretation which is taken to be straightforward and unproblematic. Such an approach fails to recognize the ‘entangled’ nature of human psychological concepts, which arise via culturally-specific, historically contingent, and technologically mediated processes, resulting in uniquely human psychological skills and concepts, that are then subject to further entanglement—they are not fixed and general biological functions. Thus, part of this project will involve a focus on the history of the epistemic and cultural contexts in which syntax emerged as a way of accounting for the uniqueness of the human mind and behaviour.  With Professors Barton and Clay, Professor Barrett will work on developing interdisciplinary position papers, as well contribute to weekly workshops and collaborate with other team members and visiting fellows to develop the long-term objective of forming an interdisciplinary Centre for Mind, Brain and Culture at Durham University.  

Events

TBC