• The ECOM Reading Group will be meeting this Summer, starting in June. All ECOM members and friends are welcome to participate. Further information about these meetings will likely be shared via the ECOM mailing list. If you are not currently a mailing list member and would like to receive these emails, please contact Jim (sias@live.unc.edu).

• ECOM Coordinator Jim Sias recently defended his dissertation “Emotion, Virtue, and Moral Perception: A Defense of Moral Intuitions.” Starting this Fall, he will be an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA.  Congratulations x2, Jim!
• The “Making Meaning: Origins of Communication” conference was a great success! The conference was held at Duke University on April 18-20, 2013. For more information, see the conference website here.

• ECOM director, Dorit Bar-On, ECOM member, Mitchel Green, and Keith Simmons have accepted offers from the University of Connecticut.  Green will begin in Fall 2013; Bar-On and Simmons will begin in Fall 2014.  U Conn has offered substantial support for ECOM as part of a plan to expand its cognitive science program.

• The Centre for Advanced Study at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters and the Center for Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies at UNC Chapel Hill are co-sponsoring a conference entitled “Cognitive Linguistics in the Triangle: Slavic and Beyond.” The conference will be held on Friday, February 22, 2013, and is free and open to anyone interested. For more information (including the conference program), click here.

• Our friends at the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences (DIBS) have announced a conference to be held at Duke University on April 18-20, 2013. The title of the conference will be “Making Meaning: Origins of Communication,” and it is being co-organized by ECOM director Dorit Bar-On. Registration is now open (and free!).

• Registration is now open for the conference on “Mindreading, Understanding, and Emotion” (January 11-12, 2013). To visit the conference website, click here. (Attendance at the conference requires that you register. Registration is free for students, and $15 for everyone else.)

• ECOM has been awarded a grant from the Institute for the Arts & Humanities (IAH) to support a conferenceon “Mindreading, Understanding, and Emotion” to be held at UNC on January 11-12, 2013. To visit the conference website, click here.

• UNC’s Institute for the Arts & Humanities (IAH) recently awarded ECOM a grant to support a speaker series for the upcoming 2012-2013 academic year. Check the Events page for details about the speaker series.
• ECOM director Dorit Bar-On is co-organizing a conference on language evolution for the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences, to be held on April 18-20, 2013. The keynote speaker will be Robert Seyfarth (Penn).

• ECOM director Dorit Bar-On recently gave a talk entitled “Gricean Intentions, Expressive Communication, and Origins of Meaning” at both the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and St. Andrews Psychology.
• ECOM director Dorit Bar-On and Senior RA Jim Sias (along with UNC alum Matthew Chrisman) recently gave a talk entitled “(How) Is Ethical Neo-Expressivism a Hybrid View?” at a conference on “Hybrid Theories in Metaethics” at the University of Edinburgh (co-organized by another UNC alum, Mike Ridge), July 2-4, 2012.
• ECOM director Dorit Bar-On recently gave a talk entitled “Mind: the Gap” at the Fifth British Wittgenstein Society (BWS) Conference on “Wittgenstein, Enactivism, and Animal Minds” at the University of Hertfordshire, July 7-8, 2012. Videos of the conference presentations should soon be available here. ECOM member Kevin Richardson also attended the conference, after being awarded a travel stipend.
• ECOM director Dorit Bar-On was recently awarded the Zachary Smith Distinguished Term Professorship in Research and Undergraduate Education for 4 years, starting July 2013. Congratulations, Dorit!

• On May 14, 2013, at the University of Hertfordshire (de Havilland Campus), Dr. Ian Ground of the British Wittgenstein Society will give a talk entitled “Listen to the Lion: Wittgenstein and Animal Minds.”

• Last week, 7 ECOM members and affiliates attended the Protolanguage Workshop at the University of Virginia. The 2-day workshop had 7 speakers (including keynote Ruth Millikan) and 6 commentators from 12 universities. It was a great success. Stay tuned for summaries of talks and commentaries.

• ECOM director Dorit Bar-On has been invited to visit and talk at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, June 2012.
• ECOM members Jim Sias, Matthew Priselac, and Kevin Richardson are currently involved as RAs for two upcoming talks: Bar-On’s invited talk on neo-expressivism with UNC alum Matthew Chrisman at a conference on “Hybrid Theories in Metaethics” at Edinburgh (co-organized by another UNC alum, Mike Ridge), July 2-4, 2012; and Bar-On’s invited talk at the Fifth British Wittgenstein Society (BWS) Conference on “Wittgenstein, Enactivism, and Animal Minds” at the University of Hertfordshire, July 7-8, 2012.
• Senior RA Jim Sias has won the prestigious UNC Tanner Teaching Award. Congratulations, Jim!

• ECOM director Dorit Bar-On and affiliated faculty member Mitchell Green have organized a Protolanguage Workshop to be hosted at the University of Virginia on March 30-31, 2012. To learn more, please visit the Protolanguage Workshop page by clicking here. (A new tab has been added to the navigation bar at the top of the ECOM website.)

• Maria Cristina Amoretti and Gerhard Preyer’s edited volume Triangulation: From an Epistemological Point of View — which includes a paper by ECOM members Dorit Bar-On and Matthew Priselac entitled “Triangulation and the Beasts” (see the publications page) — was recently reviewed by Nathaniel Goldberg for Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. (To see the review, click here.) Of Bar-On and Priselac’s paper in particular, Goldberg writes, “This is one of the more original essays in the collection. … [T]heir ideas are worth a close look.”

• The Secretary of the British Wittgenstein Society (BWS), Dr. Ian Ground, has expressed interest in supporting ECOM. Dr. Ground has done work on expressive behavior and animal minds. (For information on the BWS’s upcoming conference on “Enactivism and Animal Minds,” click here.)

• ECOM will be hosting a Speaker Series during the upcoming academic year! We have invited researchers from Linguistics, Philosophy, and Evolutionary Biology to speak on the nature and origins of meaning. For more information, click here.

• Dorit Bar-On and Mitchell Greene have organized a Protolanguage Workshop to be hosted at the University of Virginia. Ruth Millikan(UConn) will be the Keynote Speaker. More information coming soon.

• The first product of an ECOM collaboration, “Triangulation and the Beasts” by Dorit Bar-On and Matthew Priselac, has just appeared in print — see book cover.

• One of our affiliated members, Mitch Green, wrote an article for the ACLS (American Council of Learned Societies) about our collaborative work. See it here.

The first ECOM-related conference, co-organized by Dorit Bar-On and Mitchell Green, was held in London, March 24-26th, 2011. It featured 15 speakers/commentators from 7 countries. For a list of the speakers (and audio of some of the talks) visit here.