About our staff

Dr Miranda Anderson completed her MSc and PhD in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh, after several years travelling and working in Europe and Asia, following on from her BA (Hons) in History at University College London. She was awarded an Early Career Fellowship by the Leverhulme Trust in order to pursue work on a book,  The Renaissance Extended Mind, which explores parallels (and contrasts) between recent philosophical theories on the embodied and extended mind and analogous ideas in literary, philosophical, and scientific texts circulating between the fifteenth and early-seventeenth century. She is affiliated with the Mind & Cognition group in the Philosophy department at the University of Edinburgh.

Miranda works across the arts and humanities, and on philosophical and critical theories. She has pioneered new approaches to literature, art and culture through drawing on insights from philosophy, cognitive science and the digital humanities. She is fascinated by exploring ideas of the mind and self across a range of disciplinary and historical contexts.

Miranda is currently working on contemporary literature and culture. She was Principal Investigator on the AHRC-funded Art of Distributed Cognition project (£98,886) which involves a collaboration with Talbot Rice Gallery, and the creation of a contemporary art exhibition, The Extended Mind. The exhibition explores an array of ways in which aspects of the world beyond our brain, such as our bodies, objects, language, ideas, other people and environments can, and often do, expand our cognitive capacities. 

Miranda initiated and was a Research Fellow on the AHRC-funded project A History of Distributed Cognition (2014-18). The project explored the expression and suppression of the paradigm of distributed cognition from classical antiquity to the mid-twentieth century and she is an editor on the four volumes published by Edinburgh University Press (2018-20). 

She is now an Honorary Fellow in History, Classics and Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh and an Anniversary Fellow in Philosophy and Literature at the University of Stirling.

• Royal Society of Edinburgh’s Public Engagement Advisory Group (PEG)
• Elected Member of The Royal Society of Edinburgh's Young Academy of Scotland
• Japan Society for the Promotion of Science  (JSPS) Alumni Association, Regional Manager for Scotland

• Full Publications Information (Edinburgh Research Explorer)

• The Extended Mind | Talbot Rice Gallery

• History of Distributed Cognition
• Shakespeare and the Mind | Human Mind Project
• Palimpsest: Literary Edinburgh/ Lit Long: Edinburgh
• Profile on academia.edu
• Twitter: @_mirandaanders

She was an associate researcher on the Balzan Project, which was based at St John’s College, Oxford University, and was directed by Prof. Terence Cave. This interdisciplinary project explored the topic of ‘Literature as an Object of Knowledge’ and focused on cognitive approaches to literary studies.

Miranda was the initiator of Palimpsest as a prototype and of the AHRC-funded project on which she then became a Research Fellow. Palimpsest, now renamed LitLong, enables users to access fictional and historical texts set in Edinburgh via an interactive website, a database, or via their mobile while exploring the city.

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 illuminate each other. She is also interested in how the digital humanities can contribute to our reading of literary texts, particulary in terms of assessing the attribution of aesthetic qualities.

Her travel abroad has included several years in Japan, first as a Monbukagakusho research scholar, supported by the Japanese Embassy in London, and later as a fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS). She previously edited The Book of the Mirror on the history of the mirror as an object and as a motif in literature and art. She  published several papers on her research in Japan with Prof Hiroshi Ishiguro, which explore the implications of robotics for understandings of human nature.

Selected Presentations

• ‘Where is my Mind? Renaissance Extended Minds’, Invited Speaker, Birkbeck Arts Week Panel, London, 2022.

• ‘Early Modern Cognition’, Invited Speaker, Renaissance Society of America, Dublin, 2022.

• Keynote Speaker, Cognitive Futures in the Arts and Humanities 2021 Conference, Stoneybrook University, New York, 2021.

• ‘Early Modern Distributed Cognition’, Centre for Early Modern Studies, University of Aberdeen. Guest lecture for staff and students, 2020.

• ‘Where is your Mind?’, The Royal Society of Edinburgh, 2019

• ‘Mind in Literature: Enacting Aristotle’, Fiction, Cognition & Interpretation: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Aristotle’s Poetics, Invited Speaker, University of Navarra, 26-28 October 2017.

• ‘From Mind-forged Manacles to Mind-extending Marvels', ECHIC 2017 Conference: European Consortium for Humanities Institutes and Centres, Scottish Parliament & John McIntyre Conference Centre, 5-7 Apr 2017

'A History of Distributed Cognition', Japan-UK Research Promotion Conference, Embassy of Japan, London, 16 Nov 2016.

'Immersion and Defamiliarisation' (with Stefan Iversen), Cognitive and Unnatural Narratology Workshop, Dept of Culture & Aesthetics, Stockholm University, 4 Nov 2016.

'We-Mode' workshop, Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge, 23 June 2016.

'Mind in World' Pecha Kucha, AHRC Common Ground event, University of York, 21 June 2016.

'A Pattern Theory of Mind and Self in Love and Literature' (with Shaun Gallagher), Cognitive Futures in the Humanities, University of Helsinki, 13-15 June 2016.

'Shakespeare and the Mind', Invited Speaker, Public Lecture for the Human Mind Project (supported by Senate House's Shakespeare's Metamorphosis series), 18 May 2016.

Miranda initiated and was a co-investigator on the pilot project 'A History of Distributed Cognition' which was based at Eidyn: The Edinburgh Centre for Mind, Epistemology and Normativity. She initiated and was a Research Fellow on the full scale-research project, A History of Distributed Cognition. The project explores the expression and suppression of the paradigm of distributed cognition from classical antiquity to the twentieth century. She is now leading the AHRC-funded Art of Distributed Cognition project (£98,886) which involves a collaboration with Talbot Rice Gallery, and the creation of a contemporary art exhibition, The Extended Mind. The exhibition explores an array of ways in which aspects of the world beyond our brain, such as our bodies, objects, language, ideas, other people and environments can, and often do, expand our cognitive capacities.

In 2018 Miranda was elected to the Royal Society of Edinburgh's Young Academy of Scotland and in 2019 she was appointed lead of their Smarter strategic theme. In 2017 she was appointed Regional Director for Scotland of the JSPS Alumni Association  and was a participant in Scottish Crucible. She is a collaborator on the Royal Society of Edinburgh funded project: The Cognitive Experience of Verbal and Screen-based Narrative and the Potential Role of the Episodic Memory. Miranda was awarded a Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation Grant for a lecture tour  in December 2017 to Kyoto University, Osaka University and the University of Tokyo.'

The Extended Mind  contemporary art exhibition, which I curated with Talbot Rice Gallery involved working with numeorus community organisations. Along with the History of Distributed Cognition project, whose project parttner was the National Museum of Scotland, this provided an impact case study for REF 2021: Introducing Distributed Cognition to New Audiences (Changing how galleries and museums think about themselves and how people think about them).