Interdisciplinary Research
The Ottoline Club
The Ottoline Club is a faculty club for interdisciplinary discussion, which meets roughly fortnightly during term. All members of the academic staff at the university belong to the club. Meetings, usually in the late afternoon and lasting around ninety minutes, typically comprise a short talk by a colleague on a research interest of theirs, and an extended resulting conversation.
A principal aim of the club is to foster free and relaxed interdisciplinary exchange. The topics of the talks are therefore often germane to several of the humanities subjects, and occasionally the talk is itself multidisciplinary in manner and/or concerned with the methodology of teaching or research. Frequently, the colleague who speaks will be airing new ideas or expounding research which is at a fairly early stage of development. Discussion at meetings thus serves as a source of preliminary informal feedback for projects which may then be taken to other forums.
The Club is named after the celebrated Bloomsbury figure Lady Ottoline Morrell, by way of affectionate tribute to her activity as a facilitator of intellectual companionship. An account of each meeting is subsequently written by the secretary (currently Dr David Mitchell), so there is a cumulative repository of write-ups of all meetings since the first one took place in December 2012 available here on the Academic Blog.
The Cognitive Science Research Group
The Cognitive Science Research Group (CSRG) is an interdisciplinary group, comprising faculty members in philosophy and psychology, devoted to the investigation of theoretical issues surrounding the mind and brain, and the explanation of cognition and action. Areas of interest of the group include: perception (especially vision); intentionality; language; knowledge representation; computation and information processing; artificial intelligence; conative states; action.
The CSRG runs a fortnightly seminar discussing research pertaining to the cognitive sciences, occasionally in conjunction with the Philosophy Society and/or the Psychology Society, and has organised the Northeastern University London Mind and Brain Conference and Judgment: Act and Object, an Northeastern University London workshop in 2016. They also organised the ‘Numbers, Minds, and Magnitudes’ conference that ran in 2019.
The group also contributes to the Northeastern University London Academic Blog.
Previous speakers at the Cognitive Science Research Group seminar include: Dominic Alford-Duguid, Brian Ball, Vanessa Carr, Sam Clarke, Daniel Dennett, Jake Dunn-Quilty Kate Fisher, Marie Guillot, Alison Hall, Raamy Majeed, Jonathon McIntosh, Fintan Nagle, Philip Newell, Charles Ross, Christoph Schuringa, Ioannis Votsis, Darrell Jaya- Ratnam, Emmanuel Viebahn, Peter Vickers, Elmar Unnsteinsson, Chris Fox and Sam Wilkinson.
Northeastern University London Working Paper Series
Northeastern University London has inaugurated a working paper series which presents research that Northeastern University London Faculty are either currently developing or pre-proof manuscripts of already published articles and chapters.