Paul J. Thibault is professor in linguistics and communication studies in the Faculty of Humanities and Education, University of Agder, Kristiansand, Norway and Hans Christian Andersen Academy Visiting Professor in the Institute of Language and Communication and the Centre for Human Interactivity, University of Southern Denmark, Odense (2015-2018). In 2016, he took up the positions of Visiting Chair Professor in the "Scholar of Northeast Normal University" Program of the Northeast Normal University, Changchun, P.R. China (东北师范大) and Visiting Research Fellow in the Department of Languages at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland (2016-2017).
He has held academic posts in Australia, China, Italy, and Hong Kong. His research interests and many publications are in the areas of applied and general linguistics, development, distributed language and cognition, graphic trace-making, human-animal interaction, human interactivity, learning, multimodality, narrative, social theory, learning theory and teaching and learning in higher education, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and systemic-functional linguistics. With Mark King at UNSW Sydney, Australia, he is currently developing theoretical frameworks and methodological tools for the study of human learning in tertiary settings using the perspectives of distributed cognition, eye tracking, interactivity, and Multimodal Event Analysis. His forthcoming book, Distributed Language: Languaging, affective cognition and the extended human ecology is currently under evaluation by an international publisher. He is also currently working on a book entitled Language, Body, World: A critical rereading of Hjelmslev. He is currently on the editorial boards of six international journals.
