Wednesday, February 06, 2008

George Lakoff at Pitt this Friday

My colleagues at the Pitt Law School are putting on a conference this Friday (February 8) that may hold broader interest, and it's free and open to the public.

The conference is titled “The 21st Century Brain: Why It Matters for the Academic and Political Worlds.”

The keynote will be delivered by George Lakoff, the Berkeley linguist with an affection for metaphor. Professor Lakoff earned popular fame a few years ago with “Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate,” which talks about language and politics. My guess is that this Friday's presentation -- 12 noon at the law school -- will be less about politics and more about linguistics and metaphor. It should be provocative nonetheless.

Lakoff will be joined by an all-star lineup of legal scholars, linguists, and rhetoriticians, including Ed Rubin (Dean at Vanderbilt Law), Steven Winter (Wayne State Law), Barbara Johnstone (CMU English), Scott Kiesling (Pitt Linguistics), Pascual Masullo (Pitt Linguistics), Andreea Deciu Ritivoi (CMU English), and my colleague George Taylor, who is organizing the event. A full lineup and schedule appears at the PDF invitation, which is online here. The conference gets started at 10 am.

That PDF also gives instructions on RSVP’ing for the event (register here — it’s free, unless you're a PA lawyer and want PA CLE credit, and then it’s all of $50).

The law school is located at the corner of Forbes and Bouquet in Oakland, across Forbes from the O (or for the less gastronomically inclined, across Bouquet from Panera).

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