Farzad Sharifian

Who is Farzad Sharifian?

Farzad Sharifian is Professor in the School of Languages, Cultures, and Linguistics at Monash University, Australia. He is a leading linguist with a multidisciplinary background in cognitive science, anthropology and education. Sharifian is a pioneer of Cultural Linguistics who has developed a theoretical model of cultural conceptualisations and language, which draws on analytical tools and theoretical advancements in several disciplines, including cognitive linguistics, cognitive anthropology, anthropological linguistics, distributed cognition, complexity science, and cognitive psychology. This theoretical model and its applications in the areas of intercultural communication, cross-cultural pragmatics, second language learning, and political discourse analysis are the subject of Sharifian’s monograph entitled Cultural conceptualisations and Language.

Sharifian was born and grew up in Isfahan, a major city in Iran. He migrated to Australia in 1998 and completed a PhD in applied linguistics at Edith Cowan University, Perth in 2003. Sharifian’s PhD study, which develops a novel theoretical framework of cultural conceptualisations and applies it to the exploration of Aboriginal English, received multiple awards and was described in the citation for his 2002 University Research Medal as “having the potential to transform the research approach within the discipline”. In 2003, he was awarded a Post-Doctoral Fellowship by the Australian Research Council, which he undertook at the University of Western Australia. In 2005 Sharifian was appointed as a lecturer at Monash University in Melbourne, where he founded the academic program of English as an International Language.