Hannah Pelikan has an interdisciplinary background, combining a Ph.D. in Language and Culture from Linköping University (2023) with an engineering degree in Interaction Technology from the University of Twente in the Netherlands (2018) and a bachelor’s degree in Cognitive Science from Osnabrück University, Germany (2015). Before becoming a Pro Futura Scientia Fellow, Pelikan was a postdoctoral fellow in the Wallenberg AI, Autonomous Systems and Software Program – Humanity and Society (WASP-HS), where she was mentored by Prof. Barry Brown (Stockholm/Copenhagen) and Prof. Mathias Broth (Linköping). She was also a visiting researcher at the University of Nottingham (2025), working with Dr. Stuart Reeves, and at Cornell University (2017, 2022), working with Dr. Malte Jung.

Pelikan’s work lies at the intersection of sociological ethnomethodology and linguistic conversation analysis (EMCA), human-computer interaction and cognitive science. She contributes an empirical understanding of how people interact with robots by capturing video recordings of robots in everyday interactions, such as in her award-winning paper “Encountering Autonomous Robots on Public Streets” (Proceedings of the 2024 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, 2024). Pelikan publishes in the humanities as well as in computer science and engineering outlets, and her work has been funded by the Swedish Innovation Agency Vinnova and by the UK Research and Innovation – Responsible AI program. Recent publications include “When a Robot Comes to Life: The Interactional Achievement of Agency as a Transient Phenomenon” (Social Interaction. Video-Based Studies of Human Sociality, 5 (3), 2023); and “The People Behind the Robots: How Wizards Wrangle Robots in Public Deployments” (Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2025).

In her Pro Futura Scientia project, Pelikan studies robots in public settings with a particular focus on the humans that make systems (appear to be) autonomous. Her work advances interactional and embodied theories of human sociality and artificial intelligence and develops methods for ethnomethodological interaction design.

This information is accurate as of the academic year 2025-26.