AIRG Lecture by Dr Adalberto Magnavacca

We are pleased to announce that Dr. Adalberto Magnavacca, post-doctoral researcher in our GROUPMINDS project, has been invited to deliver a lecture at the Antiquities Interdisciplinary Research Group (AIRG) at the University of Miami. The lecture, titled “Writing Wars, Reading Social Minds: Group Agency and Groupminds in Caesar’s De Bello Gallico”, will take place on Wednesday, December 3, at 11am-12:30pm (EST) at the University of Miami under the AIRG Lecture Series. A Zoom link can also be shared for those who would like to attend online. For more information, please visit this link.

The lecture will explore the concept of group minds — i.e., collective cognition and group agency — as manifested in ancient narrative contexts. Drawing on the research carried out in the context of the GROUPMINDS project, Dr. Magnavacca will show how group-level entities (such as military or political collectives) can be represented as possessing cognitive agency in classical texts. This offers a novel lens on social cognition, collective intentionality, and the ways ancient authors understood collective identity and action.

We warmly congratulate Dr. Magnavacca on this invitation, which attests to the growing interest and interdisciplinary appeal of the GROUPMINDS approach — bridging classical philology, cognitive science, philosophy of mind, and narrative studies. The fact that AIRG has included this lecture in its program underscores the relevance of group-cognition debates beyond strictly philosophical or psychological disciplines, reaching into classical studies, historiography, and social theory.

We look forward to following the discussion and feedback that this lecture will surely generate — a promising sign that the theme of “group minds” resonates widely and continues to attract scholarly attention across traditional disciplinary boundaries.