fot. Andrzej Romański/UMK
Slawomir Wacewicz holds a PhD in linguistics and is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland. He is a co-founder and current head of NCU’s Center for Language Evolution Studies (http://cles.umk.pl), an international research group conducting cutting-edge, interdisciplinary research on a range of topics in language evolution and human interaction.
An overarching perspective in dr Wacewicz’s research is that of the calculus of costs vs benefits of communication, and a key question – that of the evolutionary stability of the earliest forms of language. He has consistently applied this evolutionary perspective to studying a range of phenomena in bodily communication, i.e. communicating with and through the use of one’s own body. Most importantly, his work has been instrumental in outlining the role of pantomime and gesture in the evolution of language. Here he has focussed both on definitional aspects of pantomime as well as its potential role as a precursor to fully-fledged language, and conducted experimental work on how the use of pantomime changes through repeated interaction. Another strand of his work concerns the role of the eyes (including their wide shape and brightly colored sclera, features different in humans when compared to other apes) and gaze signalling in interaction. Finally, theoretical integration of his own results with those by the CLES group and other language-evolution scholars has led him to articulate the conception of a “platform of trust” as a deep design feature of language and a basic condition for the evolutionary emergence.
Slawomir Wacewicz is currently leading a project “The human white sclera: the role of colouration and contrast in perceiving the eyes of others” funded by the Polish National Science Centre, and is acting as a mentor in several externally funded PhD and postdoctoral projects by international members of CLES.
Research by Slawomir Wacewicz has resulted in two books and over 60 academic articles in collected volumes and journals such as Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, PLoS One, Scientific Reports, Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, Language and Cognition, Language and Communication, Language Sciences, Linguistics and Philosophy, Journal of Language Evolution, Biolinguistics, Biosemiotics, or Interaction Studies.
Slawomir Wacewicz has contributed to the language evolution research community by serving on the scientific committee of the JCoLE 2022 and Evolang 2024 conferences, and by being the founder of the Protolang conference series, head of the local committee of the Evolang 2018 conference, and associate editor of the journals Interaction Studies and Journal of Language Evolution. His work in committees has included serving as a vice-president of the Polish Society for Evolutionary and Human Sciences (PTNCE), working in an advisory panel on the lists of academic journals for the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education, serving on the NCU Toruń “think tank” (University Strategic Analysis Board), or working as a Vice-Chair for the evaluations of proposals in the Horizon Europe MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships programme.