De Gruyter Handbook of Humor Studies

Thomas E. Ford is a Professor of Social Psychology at Western Carolina University and a former editor-in-chief of　HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research. He is a co-editor of the 2021 book, Social Psychology of Humor, an integrative volume detailing advances in theory and research in the social psychological study of humor. He is a co-author of the 2018 edition of The Psychology of Humor: An Integrative Approach, a comprehensive textbook providing a broad overview of research on the psychology of humor. Finally, he and his colleagues have developed the Prejudiced Norm Theory, an influential theory on the impact of disparaging humor on prejudice and discrimination. Władysław Chłopicki is a Professor of Linguistics at the Department of English Studies at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. His academic interests include interdisciplinary humor research in the context of cultural studies, cognitive linguistics, linguistic pragmatics and narratology as well as translation studies. He authored numerous articles mainly related to humor studies and a Polish-language monograph humor research. He also co-edited more than a dozen monographs on humor, inter-cultural communication, communication styles and linguistics, e.g. Humorous Discourse (by Walter de Gruyter). Most recently his main focus has been on humor in the public sphere: he has led and participated in a number of related European grants (the research results of these are systematically published on the website https://humorinpublic.eu/). He is founder and co-editor of the European Journal of Humour Research and Tertium Linguistic Journal. Giselinde Kuipers is a Research Professor of Sociology at the KU Leuven in Leuven, Belgium. Her research focuses on the social shaping of cultural standards and their consequences for social inequalities and identities in the context of increasing globalization. She has published widely on humor, including the award-winning Good Humor Bad Taste: A Sociology of the Joke (Berlin/Boston 2006, second updated edition 2015) as well as many articles in English and Dutch. From 2012 till 2016, she served as Editor-in-Chief of HUMOR International Journal of Humor Research. Currently, Kuipers co-directs a large international research project on humor during the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as a smaller project on humor in the European public sphere.