Hongbing Yu PhD

Dr. Hongbing Yu is Associate Professor of Culture and Semiotics in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at Toronto Metropolitan University. He holds a Ph.D. (2014, with distinction) in Applied Linguistics and Cultural Semiotics from Nanjing Normal University.

Dr. Yu’s two monographs, On Semiotic Modeling (Soochow University Press, 2019) and Living by Models (Mouton De Gruyter, forthcoming), afford an interdisciplinary perspective on the biosemiotic mechanisms of language, literature, cognition and culture. In addition, he has published multiple translated books, edited volumes, book series, and peer-reviewed journal papers on a variety of topics such as language, communication, cultural memory, narrative, cognition, biosemiotics, education, and so on. Dr. Yu is currently focused on social ritual, mythical thinking, cultural semiotics of mental well-being, as well as the cognitive dimensions of Chinese philosophy and religion, especially of Taoism and Zen Buddhism.

In and beyond his North American sociocultural milieu, Dr. Yu has held numerous international leadership positions, including President of the Semiotic Society of America, Vice President of the International Association for Semiotic Studies, Secretary General of the Asian Semiotics International Association, Executive Director of the International Institute for Semiotic Studies at Nanjing Normal University, and founding Director of the International Institute for Language and Cultural Semiotics at Dalian University of Foreign Languages. Through these roles, he has remained deeply committed to fostering intellectual creativity, promoting constructive global dialogue, and upholding academic integrity and collegiality across the fields of linguistics, culture, and semiotics.

Dr. Yu also serves as Editor-in-Chief of Chinese Semiotic Studies and holds editorial and advisory appointments across multiple international platforms. He has been a Research Associate at the York Centre for Asian Research, Associate Editor of Biosemiotics, Associate Editor (2016–2021) and editorial board member of Semiotica, Associate Editor of Brill Research Perspectives in Popular Culture, and editorial board member of The American Journal of Semiotics and the Brill series Semiotics: Signs of the Times.

Since 2007, Dr. Yu has taught undergraduate and graduate courses on cultural studies, semiotics, linguistic anthropology, cognitive linguistics, the history of Western thought, Chinese cultural traditions, and education. A progenitor of critical cognitive semiotics, he is passionate about heuristic inquiry and the cultivation of critical and creative thinking in his classrooms.