Yanna Popova, assistant professor in the Department of Cognitive Science, (D.Phil in Language and Literature, University of Oxford) has previously taught at the Universities of Oxford and Birmingham. Her education has been in linguistics, literature, and philosophy and her main areas of research are cognitive linguistics and cognitive poetics. Popova’s publications reflect her long-standing interest in the relationship between language and perception, including verbal synaesthesia. Other interests comprise verbal and pictorial metaphor; narrative as a fundamental human cognitive ability; and time as an aspect of human embodiment. Cognitive poetics arises from the insights of cognitive linguistics and holds that linguistic knowledge is figurative and embodied, and it is this situated, embodied aspect of cognition that Popova finds most interesting and worth pursuing.