IASS Election: Massimo Leone Secretary General Candidature

Candidate for Secretary General

Massimo Leone

Short bionote (15/09/2014)

Massimo Leone is Professor of Semiotics and Cultural Semiotics at the Department of Philosophy, University of Turin, Italy. He graduated in Communication Studies from the University of Siena, and holds a DEA in History and Semiotics of Texts and Documents from Paris VII, an MPhil in Word and Image Studies from Trinity College Dublin, a PhD in Religious Studies from the Sorbonne, and a PhD in Art History from the University of Fribourg (CH). He was visiting scholar at the CNRS in Paris, at the CSIC in Madrid, Fulbright Research Visiting Professor at the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, Endeavour Research Award Visiting Professor at the School of English, Performance, and Communication Studies at Monash University, Melbourne, Faculty Research Grant Visiting Professor at the University of Toronto, “Mairie de Paris” Visiting Professor at the Sorbonne, DAAD Visiting Professor at the University of Potsdam, Visiting Professor at the École Normale Supérieure of Lyon (Collegium de Lyon), and Visiting Professor at the University of Kyoto. His work focuses on the role of religion in modern and contemporary cultures. Massimo Leone has single-authored six books, _Religious Conversion and Identity – The Semiotic Analysis of Texts_ (London and New York: Routledge, 2004; 242 pp.); _Saints and Signs – A Semiotic Reading of Conversion in Early Modern Catholicism_ (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2010; 656 pp.),  _Sémiotique de l’âme_, 3 vols (Berlin et al.: Presses Académiques Francophones, 2012), _Annunciazioni: percorsi di semiotica della religione_ (Rome: Aracne, 2014, 1000 pp.), and _Spiritualità digitale: il senso religioso nell’era della smaterializzazione_ (Udine: Mimesis, 2014), _Sémiotique du fundamentalisme : messages, rhétorique, force persuasive_ (Paris: l’Harmattan, 2014), edited twenty collective volumes, and published more than three hundred articles in semiotics and religious studies. He has lectured in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, and North America. He is the chief editor of _Lexia_, the Semiotic Journal of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Communication, University of Torino, Italy and member of the jury that determines the Mouton d’Or Prize given to the best article published in the internationa journal _Semiotica_ (de Gruyter) in a year (2012, 2013, 2014, chair of the jury in 2014).

He speaks Italian, English, French, German, Portuguese, Spanish, and has a working knowledge of Farsi and other ancient and modern languages.