Dr Arianna Maiorani

Dr Arianna Maiorani is Reader in Linguistics and Multimodality in the School of Social Sciences and Humanities. Maiorani’s ground-breaking use of multimodal theory to explore dance as an embodied form of communication underpins her position as a global innovator in the burgeoning research area of kinesemiotics. She has long recognised the value of international research collaboration to the development of interdisciplinary work and has engaged actively with the Institute of Advanced Studies, bringing Professor John Bateman (University of Bremen) and Dr Jason Hawreliak (Brock University, Ontario) to Loughborough as IAS Visiting Fellows, and hosting more than a dozen other international Fellows as co-lead of the IAS Annual Theme, Time, in 2020-21.

Maiorani’s collaboration with Bateman has been exceptionally fruitful. Following a pilot project in partnership with the English National Ballet in 2017, Maiorani and Bateman were awarded a prestigious AHRC-DFG grant for The Kinesemiotic Body in 2021, followed by joint symposia, publications and edited issues in journals such as Humanities and Social Sciences Communications (2022) and Frontiers in Communication (2023).  Maiorani’s major research monograph, Kinesemiotics: Modelling How Choreographed Movement Means in Space (2020), also flourished in the context of this enduring collaboration. More recently, Maiorani has been developing projects that take kinesemiotic approaches to the study of movement as communication in fields such as sport and gaming. In the latter, she has now submitted a large grant application to the AHRC (Kinesemiotics for EDI: tackling gender discrimination in fighting video games) with Hawreliak, an IAS Visiting Fellow from 2022.

Dr Maiorani has been fulsome in her praise of the support she has received for her research through the Institute of Advanced Studies, referring to the IAS as ‘absolutely fundamental’ in developing and maintaining strong relationships among international academics.  In Maiorani’s words:

"I'm actually really proud of having been involved in so many activities with the IAS. … I think the IAS is a really important platform for interdisciplinarity. True interdisciplinarity. They make an effort to have people from various, sometimes very distant, research areas meet on a scheme, for example, or meet on a common interest and have really meaningful conversations in an informal, but nonetheless academic, environment. The IAS offers precisely this very, very precious opportunity."

Maiorani’s research success demonstrates the potential of bringing international and interdisciplinary collaboration to the heart of intellectual and creative enquiry. We are pleased that the IAS was able to play a facilitating role in making this happen and we look forward to her next projects in kinesemiotics.