Alan Cienki is Professor of Language Use & Cognition and English Linguistics at Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. He is the author of Ten Lectures on Spoken Language and Gesture (2017) and co-editor of Metaphor and Gesture (2008) and the two-volume handbook Body–Language–Communication (2013, 2014).
'Not long ago, gestures of the hand were considered of little interest, an ornament to humanity's seemingly greater achievement, speech. This wide-ranging handbook demonstrates how profoundly this has changed. Gestures are studied in multiple disciplines, with a multitude of methods, and offer ever new insights into the nature, variety, and evolution of symbolic interaction, cooperation, and embodied cognition.' Jürgen Streeck, The University of Texas at Austin