Lacey Okonski is a psycholinguist who studies metaphor. She received her PhD from the University of California in Santa Cruz, is a Fulbright Fellow, and is now a Marie Sklodowska Curie Actions (MSCA) Fellow/Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Oslo in the Department of Literature, Area Studies, and European Languages (ILOS). Areas of interest include Cognitive Linguistics, metaphor, allegory, prepositions, metaphor identification and analysis, Second Language Acquisition, dance, Mother Earth metaphors, and cognitive poetics. Key publications include peer-reviewed journal articles in Metaphor and Symbol, Journal of Pragmatics, and Cognitive Semantics.
Her MSCA project is titled “PrepApp: An Embodied Scenes approach for the teaching and learning of English prepositions.” The project uses a novel theoretical approach for preposition lessons by combining insights from Cognitive Linguistics and corpus data. She intends to make preposition profiles for multiple English prepositions and use these profiles to make lessons for students learning English as an additional language.
Outside of the office, she enjoys Latin dance and has been a member of various Latin dance companies, including Mambo Romero (San Francisco), Santo Rico (Orlando), and Phoenix Soul Movement Company (Baltimore Area). She also enjoys plant-based cooking walks in nature. She is a member of the Native American community, the Lenape of Delaware, and she serves on their Board of Directors.