Timothy Justus

Natural Sciences Fellow, SCAS.
Associate Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science, Pitzer College, Claremont


With a background in music, psychology, and biology, Timothy Justus received a PhD in cognitive
neuroscience from the University of California, Berkeley. Since 2012, Justus has taught psychology
and cognitive science at Pitzer College, one of five undergraduate Claremont Colleges near Los Angeles.
Justus has authored over thirty articles with central themes concerning the cognition of sound, music,
and language and serves on the editorial boards of Music Perception, Musicae Scientiae, and Auditory
Perception & Cognition
.

Justus's recent scholarship has emphasized the cognition of music from an interdisciplinary perspective
that combines musicology, experimental psychology, and cognitive neuroscience. Work grounded in
this approach has concerned the aesthetics of musical harmony, the emotional connotations of modes
and timbres, and the use of music to express meaning in film. Justus also brings a longstanding interest
in psycholinguistics, having published on the mental lexicon, the brain regions that mediate language, and
the cognitive/neural relationships between language and music.

At SCAS, Justus will leverage an interdisciplinary background in the humanities, behavioural sciences, and
natural sciences to better understand visual art, music, literature, and film as products of human minds and
cultures. This project, Communicating Art, takes as an additional object of study the act of theory building
across the disciplines, using the arts as a microcosm.


This information is accurate as of the academic year 2020-21.