Carmen Mª Bretones Callejas teaches at the Department of Philology at the University of Almería. She taught Spanish as a Foreign Language (EFL) at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at U.C. Berkeley. She got her degree on English Philology at the University of Granada. During her research period, she studied at the universities of Maryland, Georgetown and U.C. Berkeley. She obtained her European Ph.D. in English Language and Applied Linguistics at the University of Granada and the title of her dissertation was “Metaphor and Synaesthesia in the Work of Seamus Heaney”.

    She has written several articles and book chapters. For her, the literary mind is not a separate kind of mind, it is our mind. It is the fundamental mind, the mind that makes everyday life possible. Story is a basic principle of mind and every level of our experience is interpreted by means of literary devices (for instance, metaphor, metonymy, synaesthesia and euphemism) which have cognitive and biological grounds. So, the goal of her line of investigation is to contribute to situating the study of literature in a contemporary interdisciplinary dialogue in which many of the relevant disciplines make highly significant theoretical, methodological and empirical advances. She intends to amalgamate anthropology, biology, linguistics, literary criticism, philosophy, psychology, semantics, semiotics and cognitive neuroscience, wishing both to impart their insights and findings and to learn from other disciplines, emphasizing interdisciplinarity, the interaction among literature, culture and mind, and/or multi-methodological approaches in language sciences.

Observando a los nuevos vecinos. Imágenes de Andalucía en la prensa de habla inglesa en la Comunidad Autónoma Andaluza. Sevilla: Centro de Estudios Andaluces, 2009. [In collaboration with José Francisco Fernández, José R. Ibáñez and Mª Elena García Sánchez]. To view or download document, click here.

Applied Linguistics Now: Understanding Language and Mind / La Lingüística Aplicada Hoy: Comprendiendo el Lenguaje y la Mente. Edited by Carmen Mª Bretones Callejas et al. Almería: Universidad de Almería, 2009.

Contemporary Debates on the Short Story. Ed. by José R. Ibáñez, José Francisco Fernández and Carmen Mª Bretones. Bern: Peter Lang, 2007.

“Entrevista a Charles Fillmore.” Odisea. Revista de Estudios Ingleses, 4 (2003): 41-48. To view or download document, click here.

"Euphemisms, Proverbs, Allusions, and Cognition: A Study of Two Poems by Antonio Machado." CÍRCULO de Lingüística Aplicada a la comunicación / Circle of Linguistics Applied to Communication, 22 mayo 2005. [In collaboration with Pedro J. Chamizo-Domínguez]. To view or download document, click here.

“Synaesthetic Metaphors in English”. International Computers Science Institute Technical Reports. 2001. To view or download document, click here.

Recent publications

"Estudio cognitivo del componente visual en la publicidad de automóviles". Beyond the University of Languages for Specific Purposes– The 21st Century Perspective. Edited by M.F. Litzler, J. García Laborda and C. Tejedor Martínez. Alcalá de Henares: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Alcalá de Henares, 2016. 171-175.

Temas de interés en Lingüística Aplicada. Edited by Carmen Mª Bretones Callejas. Almería: Universidad de Almería, 2010.