From April to July 2011, I had the honor of joining the Natural Media & Engineering group, led by Prof. Dr. Irene Mittelberg, in the Human Technology Centre at RWTH Aachen University in Germany. While there I:

• Gave a plenary address on “Gesture, conceptualization and distributed cognition” for the workshop The ExBodied Mind: Motion in Communication and Cognition Research at RWTH Aachen University on April 8-9.
• Gave an invited lecture (via teleconference) on “Gesture coupling body, mind, and world” in the Cognitive Science Colloquium Series at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, on April 20.
• Gave a guest lecture on “Functions of gestures” for the graduate course Advanced Gesture Analysis at RWTH Aachen University on April 26.
• Completed a book chapter on “Image schemas and conceptual metaphor in action comics” (co-authored with Elisabeth Potsch) for the volume Linguistics and the Study of Comics, edited by Frank Bramlett (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
• Presented a Science Slam on “What you can do with your hands (besides the obvious)” at the Jakobshof nightclub in Aachen on May 11.
• Presented a paper on “Coordinating and sharing gesture space” in the theme session “Within and across spaces: Towards multi-dimensional models of gesture space” for the 3^rd Conference of the Scandinavian Association for Language and Cognition at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, on June 14-16.
• Gave a guest lecture on “Distributed cognition and conceptual integration” for the graduate course Semiotics and Embodied Cognition in the Digital Age at the Bonn-Aachen International Center for Information Technology on June 29.

The Naturals in Copenhagen (June 2011): Simon Harrison, Vito Evola, Julius Hassemer, Suki Grandhi, Irene Mittelberg (leader), Bob Williams, Gina Joue (not pictured)