Giovanna Colombetti

Giovanna Colombetti is Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Sociology, Philosophy and Anthropology of the University of Exeter (UK). She was educated in Italy and the UK, and after getting a DPhil from Sussex in 2004, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the universities of York (Canada),
Trento (Italy), and Harvard. Since 2007 she has worked and lived in Exeter, temporarily visiting various research centers in Europe, Australia, and Asia.

At Exeter she is also a member of EGENIS (The Centre for the Study of the Life Sciences), where she leads the Mind, Body, and Culture research cluster. She is further affiliated with the University of Southern Denmark, where since 2021 she has been Adjunct Professor in Philosophy at the Faculty of Health Sciences and collaborates with its research cluster on Movement, Culture, and Society.

Her primary research interests lie at the intersection of philosophy of cognitive science (especially embodied and situated cognition), philosophy of emotion, phenomenology, and material culture studies. She has worked in particular on the notions of emotion and affectivity, and on their relation to theories of embodiment, action, and extended mind. She is author of several articles and chapters in which she argues that, from a dynamical and embodied-mind perspective, cognition and emotion are not separate mental faculties, and rather emotion is a primordial and all-pervasive dimension of the mind.

In 2010-2014 she was Principal Investigator of a Starting Grant funded by the European Research Council, titled “Emoting the Embodied Mind”, during which she wrote The Feeling Body: Affective Science Meets the Enactive Mind (MIT Press, 2014). Since then, she has worked on the notion of “situated affectivity” and is currently writing a second monograph on our affective relation to material objects.