Adam Kendon
Adam Kendon (b. London 1934) was educated at Cambridge University, where he studied biology and experimental psychology and at Oxford University where he was awarded the degree of D. Phil. for a thesis on communication conduct in face-to-face interaction. Since 1996 he has taught occasionally at the Univesity of Naples "Orientale" in Naples where he is now a Visiting Professor. He is also an Associate of the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science, University of Pennsylvania. He is also co-editor (with Cornelia Mueller of Berlin) of the journal Gesture, published by John Benjamins of Amsterdam.
Kendon's interests include the study of communication conduct in face-to-face interaction, the study of gesture and its relation to spoken language, and the relationship between behaviour setting and the organization of communication conduct. He has received research funds from the National Science Foundation, Washington, D.C. (twice), the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research of New York (three awards), and has been a recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship.
He has held research posts at Oxford University, University of Pittsburgh, and at Bronx State Hospital, New York. He was a Senior Research Fellow in Anthropolgy, Australian National University, Canberra from 1974-1978 and between 1980 and 1990 he continued as a Visiting Research Scholar at Australian National University and he also was a Research Scholar at the Australian Institute for Aboriginal Studies. In 1987-88 he was a Research Fellow at the Center for Research in Language and Semiotic Studies at Indiana University. He has held teaching appointments at the University of Oxford, Cornell University, Connecticut College and the University of Pennsylvania.
Since 1991 his research has focused on gesture and communication conduct in Naples and other coastal cities in southern Italy where, through his connection with the Uninversity of Naples "Orientale," he has been associated with a multidisciplinary group of researchers concerned with multimodality in communication in face-to-face interaction. He has published three books and over 100 scholarly papers.
Key Words:
Gesture, face-to-face interaction, kinesics, proxemics, Naples, communication
ethnography, sign language, language origins
Selected publications:
Kendon, A. (2003). Some uses of the head shake. Gesture, 3(1).
Kendon, A. and Versante, L. (2003). Pointing by hand in Neapolitan. In Sotaro Kita, (Ed.) Pointing: Where Language Culture and Cognition Meet. Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Kendon, A. Historical observations on the relationship between research on sign languages and language origins theory. In David Armstrong, Michael A. Karchmer and John Vickery Van Kleve, (Eds.), The Study of Signed Languages: Essays in Honor of William C. Stokoe. Washginton, D.C.: Gallaudet University Press, 2002, pp. 35-52.
Kendon, A. (2000).Gesture in Naples and Gesture in Classical Antiquity. A translation, and with an Introduction and Notes, of Andrea de Jorio's La mimica degli antichi investigata nel gestire napoletano (1832). Indiana University Press.
