Paul J. Thibault, who grew up in Newcastle, Australia and completed his PhD under Michael Halliday's supervision at the University of Sydney in 1984, is Professor in linguistics and communication studies at the University of Agder, Kristiansand, Norway. He was Hans Christian Andersen Academy Visiting Professor at the University of Southern Denmark, Odense (2015-2018). He has held academic posts in Australia, China, Italy, and Hong Kong. His research interests and publications are in the areas of applied and general linguistics, development, distributed language and cognition, graphics and interactivity, 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, systemic-functional linguistics. He is also currently working on two new books entitled The Linguistic Imagination and Language, Body, World: A critical rereading of Hjelmslev. He is currently on the editorial boards of six international journals. With Mark King at UNSW Sydney, Australia, he is 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. With Anthony Baldry, he is developing the idea of multimodal ecological literacy. He has a deep interest in ecological questions since he was seven years old. He believes that the predominantly mechanistic theories of human cognition and semiosis need to be replaced by a new account of what it means to be a living, feeling human self in the human ecology.
