Paolo Fabbri was very much a man of the word: in every sense of the term. He studied languages, speeches, images, media, and with them everything that human societies use to communicate and to give meaning to the world, to themselves and to others: gestures, clothes, tattoos, clothes, food, buildings, entire cities. So, he was…

Roland Posner, President of the IASS from 1994 to 2004, died on 26 May 2020. Born on 30 June 1942, Posner studied philosophy, comparative literature, linguistics and communication theory at the universities of Bonn, Munich and Berlin. In 1972 he graduated summa cum laude in the subjects of General Linguistics, German language and Philosophy at the…

The International Association for Semiotic Studies – IASS / AIS announces with sadness that Mexican researcher and semiotician Dr. Adrián Sergio Gimate-Welsh Hernández, from Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Iztapalapa, has recently passed away. La International Association for Semiotic Studies – IASS / AIS lamenta el fallecimiento del investigador y semiólogo mexicano Dr. Adrián Sergio Gimate-Welsh Hernández, miembro…

Dear Members, It is with great sadness that we have to inform you that one of the figures who transformed contemporary semiotics, Jesper Hoffmeyer, passed away on 25 September 2019 at age 77. An obituary will follow on this website in due course. In the meantime, we exhort you to take some time to remember…

Gunther Kress, one of the key figures in the forging of social semiotics, as well being one of the definers of multimodality studies, has died. Born in 1940 in Germany, Kress’ family moved to Australia where, on leaving school, he pursued a career as a furrier. Later, he moved to the UK where he became…

Elisabeth Walther-Bense – Obituary Professor Dr. Elisabeth Walther-Bense was born in Oberweißbach, Thuringia, Germany, on August 10, 1922. She studied philosophy, German and French philology, mathematics and physics at the Universities of Jena and Mainz, and at the College of Technology, Stuttgart, later to become the University of Stuttgart. There, she was awarded her Ph.D….

Vyacheslav Ivanov, a founding member of the Tartu-Moscow School of Semiotics departed The Tartu-Moscow School of Semiotics, born in the early 1960s as a joint initiative of intellectuals from Tartu and Moscow, was led by Juri Lotman on the Tartu side and Vyacheslav Vsevolodovich Ivanov (21 August 1919 – 7 October 2017) on the Moscow…

Jerzy Pelc (1924-2017) It is with great sadness that we announce that Jerzy Pelc, University of Warsaw, a honorary president of Institut International de Philosophie and International Association for Semiotic Studies passed away on the 2nd of June 2017. Graduated from the University of Warsaw, he was a student of such philosophers and logicians as…

Obituary for Antonino Buttita Following the death of Antonino Buttita, we would like to offer you the opportunity to pay your tributes to this leading Italian semiotician. Please add your personal comments below this obituary by Gianfranco Marrone. After D’arco Silvio Avalle, Maria Corti, Pino Paioni, Cesare Segre, Umberto Eco, Tullio De Mauro, Gianfranco Bettetini,…