Simon Harrison is Associate Professor in the Department of English at City University of Hong Kong and core member of the CityU research cluster on Brain, Behaviour and Society.
His research explores embodied and relational understandings of language, communication, and culture across diverse settings and scales with a focus on gesture. He is author of the gesture studies monograph The Impulse to Gesture: Where Language, Minds and Bodies Intersect (2018) and the interdisciplinary book Chinese Urban Shinema: Cinematicity, Society, and Millennial China (2020, with David H. Fleming).
Simon’s current book project is an ambitious monograph nearing completion entitled The Body Language Myth: Understanding Gesture in Language and Communication. Aiming to dramatically expand the micro-scope of his first phase of gesture research, this book interweaves several lines of empirical and theoretical gesture scholarship from multiple disciplines to propose a relational dynamics of gesture and gesturing bodies. These dynamics help think through different kinds of environmentally embedded gesturing that typically animate language and communication research, while unsettling common tropes surrounding the notion of ‘body language’.
In 2019 Simon co-founded the Hong Kong hub of the International Society for Gesture Studies (ISGS Hong Kong), which he chaired from 2019-2023.
Center for Intercultural Dialogue 