Dr. Jamin Pelkey PhD
Dr. Jamin Pelkey is Full Professor and Program Director in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures and a core member of the Ryerson-York graduate program in Communication & Culture. He joined the department in 2013 following five years of contract lecturing in British Columbia and more than a decade of field experience in China, Thailand, and Australia. Dr. Pelkey holds a PhD in Linguistics from La Trobe University, Melbourne (2009, with merit). His areas of specialization include anthropology of language, embodied cognition, Tibeto-Burman linguistics, historical linguistics, C. S. Peirce, and semiotics. He is an award winning teacher and researcher with three federal grants, two Dean's Awards (for teaching and research), the Mouton d’Or Award for best article in Semiotica (2017), and the Ryerson University Early Research Career Excellence Award (2018).
Dr. Pelkey's first two published monographs (Dialectology as Dialectic, De Gruyter 2011; A Phula Comparative Lexicon, SIL-LCDD 2011) define the Phula ethnolinguistic groups of China and Vietnam, identifying 18 new languages through mixed-methods fieldwork and analysis. His latest research focuses on language evolution and embodied cognition, leading to the publication of his third authored book, The Semiotics of X (Bloomsbury, 2017). He has published 15 edited or co-edited collections, including the four-volume major reference work Bloomsbury Semiotics (Bloomsbury, 2022). He is currently collaborating on the 3rd Edition of the Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (Oxford: Elsevier) as Section Editor for Meaning.
In addition to other modes of international scholarship and service, Dr. Pelkey is President of the International Association for Cognitive Semiotics, Executive Member of the International Cognitive Linguistics Association and the International Society for Biosemiotic Studies, past Managing Associate Editor of The American Journal of Semiotics, Founding Editor of the Berghahn book series Studies in Linguistic Anthropology, Founding Director of the Ryerson University Meaning Lab, and Co-Editor-in-Chief of Semiotica, journal of the International Association for Semiotic Studies.