Semiotics & Culture Speaker Series: The Round Dance of the Muses
- Date
- March 13, 2026
- Time
- 10:00 a.m. - 11:30 a.m. ET
- Location
- TRS 3-147
- Contact
- Hongbing Yu: hongbing@torontomu.ca
- Website
- https://www.torontomu.ca/llc/courses/semiotics/
Join us at this new speaker series hosted by Professors Hongbing Yu and Dana Osborne. This year's theme is "Meaning-making across language, culture, and media". The three-part speaker series is presented with the kind support of the Faculty of Arts Events and Outreach Fund.
This talk will introduce Yuri Lotman’s semiotic theory of culture and his landmark concept of the semiosphere, the bounded, dynamic space in which all sign systems operate and meaning becomes possible. Drawing on media ecology and cultural semiotics, Granata will show how Lotman’s framework illuminates the structure of our contemporary semantic environment, shaped increasingly by digital media and artificial intelligence. Students will gain new conceptual tools for analyzing how cultures produce, transmit, and contest meaning across texts, images, and artificial systems.