Secrets of Creativity

Suzanne Nalbantian is Professor of Comparative Literature at Long Island University and an interdisciplinary scholar who is Chair of the International Comparative Literature Association (ICLA) Research Committee on Literature and Neuroscience. She is the author of four scholarly books and two edited volumes. Her book Memory in Literature: From Rousseau to Neuroscience (Palgrave 2003) forged new pathways linking literary depictions of memory to neuroscience. She is the principal editor of The Memory Process: Neuroscientific and Humanistic Perspectives (MIT Press 2011), which features original essays by both humanists and brain scientists. She has lectured widely throughout the U.S. and Europe on the topic of memory at such institutions as Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Collège de France (Paris), the European Science Foundation, Max-Planck (Tübingen), and the Pasteur Institute (Paris). She has directed interdisciplinary symposia in Neuroscience and the Humanities at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, NY and at ICLA congresses in Paris and Vienna. Paul M. Matthews is the Edmund J. and Lily Safra Chair of Translational Neuroscience and Therapeutics, Head of the Division of Brain Sciences in the Department of Medicine of Imperial College, London, and Associate Director of the UK Dementia Research Institute. He is Fellow by Special Election in St. Edmund Hall, Oxford and holds Visiting Professorships at McGill University, Nanyang Technological University and the University of Edinburgh. Professor Matthews was awarded an OBE in 2008 for services to neuroscience and was elected to the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2014. He is the co-author of over 380 scientific papers. He is also co-author (with Jeffrey McQuain) of the book The Bard on the Brain: Understanding the Mind through the Art of Shakespeare and the Science of Brain Imaging and co-editor (with Suzanne Nalbantian and James McClelland) of The Memory Process: Neuroscientific and Humanistic Perspectives (MIT Press 2011).