Stephen Cowley is Professor of Organisational Cognition at the University of Southern Denmark. Having completed a Cambridge PhD entitled The Place of Prosody in Conversations, he moved to South Africa. There his focus gradually shifted from Linguistics to Cognitive Science and, later, to implications of the ecological crisis. He has held positions in Linguistics (Durban), Psychology (Durban, Bradford and Hertfordshire) and Language & Communication (Slagelse, Denmark). His empirical work examines prosodic, kinesic and verbal and organizational interactions within families, between mothers and infants, with robots, in medical simulations and in peer-review. In tracing intelligent activity to agent-environment interactions, he has expertise in problem finding, decision making and how people and organisations enhance their powers by finding ways of bringing the past to current and future concerns.

Together with Nigel Love, he founded the Distributed Language Group in 2004. The DLG aim to transform the language sciences by tracing what is human to the directed, dialogical activity that shapes the collective dimension of language. In 2012, he co- founded the International Society for the study of Interactivity, Language and Cognition, an international community that holds biennial conferences. In 2018, he was elected President of the Society. His papers span a wide range of topics that include prosody, developmental psychology, social robotics and what he sees as foundational work on how the bio-ecology shapes language and cognition. These include: (a) Linguistic embodiment and verbal constraints (Frontiers in Psychology, 2015); (b) Bio-ecology and language: a necessary unity (Language Sciences, 2014); (c) Taking a language stance (Ecological Psychology, 2011); and (d) Grounding signs of culture (Mind, Culture and Activity, 2004). He is on the Editorial board of 9 Journals (Including ones from Russia and China) and has had edited/co-edited 12 Special Issues as well as the volumes that include: Distributed Language (2011, Benjamins) Cognition Beyond the Brain: Computation, Interactivity and Human Artifice (2013, Springer; 2nd edition, 2017) and Biosemiotic Perspectives on Language and Linguistics (2015, Springer).