Juri Lotman lectures
The lecture series dedicated to the memory of Juri Lotman and to sustaining a dialogue with his ideas. The series brings to Tartu scholars whose work is already in dialogue with Lotman’s intellectual legacy, as well as scholars whose ideas invite engagement from those who value the semiotic tradition of the Tartu–Moscow School. The lecture series is organised by the Department of Semiotics at the University of Tartu.
Lectures were Juri Lotman’s principal means of engaging with his students and colleagues. For Lotman, a lecture course was also a way of exploring and testing new ideas. Alongside his regular courses, he therefore taught numerous specialised courses — distinctively Lotmanian courses in which new ideas could take shape. These ideas emerged through dialogue, and dialogue, in turn, grew out of respect for the audience. One of Lotman’s remarkable qualities was his ability to establish a connection with any audience, from scholars across different disciplines and university students to the vast audiences of his immensely popular television lectures.
Earlier lectures
On 2 December 2025, Paul Cobley — Honorary Doctor of the University of Tartu — delivered a public lecture titled “Thinking: close and distant”
Despite influential contributions by Lacková and Falýnek (2021), Compagno (2018), and Fontanille (1992), semiotics has remained largely oriented towards qualitative close reading rather than quantitative approaches (Sonesson 2026). This raises important questions: How significant are issues of scale and quantity for semiotics? And how do they relate to the central role of close reading as a scholarly practice?
Parallel to the rise of the digital humanities and the growing possibilities offered by Big Data analysis and other computational methods, Moretti launched his project of distant reading in 2013 — in explicit contrast to the established practice of close reading. Yet Moretti had already outlined the potential of distant reading in a 2000 recapitulation of the Annales School method. It can even be argued that computational methods have a much longer history (Igarashi 2015). The opposition between close and distant reading is often framed as a matter of scale, sometimes accompanied by the claim that distant reading entails a loss of attention and diminished focus (Editors of SubStance 2009).
Cobley’s public lecture examines the criticism of distant reading in opposition to close reading, questioning the assumption that the scale of reading directly corresponds to its quality — understood as a more affectively nuanced interpretation that highlights the reader’s negotiation of “extrinsic and intrinsic determinants of literary scale” (Orlemanski 2014: 230). Cobley argues that the issue of scale is far more complex than the apparent dichotomy between qualitative and quantitative methods suggests (Eve 2019). He will show how recent debates on the nature of reading itself (Trasmundi and Cobley 2021; Engberg et al. 2023) challenge and, at the same time, enrich the scale-related promises of Artificial Intelligence.
Paul Cobley has published over a hundred articles, several monographs, and edited dozens of collected volumes. His research focuses on semiotics and narratology, as well as on integrating different schools and fields within the discipline of semiotics. He has been dedicated to creating publishing opportunities for semiotic research, editing some of the most important semiotics journals, as well as book series in the field for the De Gruyter publishers. He has written Semiotics for Beginners, a textbook translated into 18 languages, including Estonian (2002).
Cobley’s collaboration with Estonian semioticians and his first visits to Tartu date back to the 1990s. He has contributed to the international recognition of the university’s cultural, bio-, and sociosemiotic studies, helping scholars from Tartu publish their research at prestigious academic publishing houses and special issues of journals. His cooperation with Tartu semioticians in compiling and editing the book series Semiotics, Communication and Cognition continues to shape the field today.
Paul Cobley was named an honorary doctor of the University of Tartu in 2025 in recognition of his outstanding achievements in semiotics, media studies, literary studies, and communication research, as well as his long-standing contributions to the international advancement of Estonian semiotics. The titles and medals of honorary doctors were conferred on 1 December at the ceremony marking the anniversary of the Estonian National University.
Abstract:
In this talk, I explore the role of cultural semiotics today. Specifically, I examine the challenges arising from the power, knowledge, and wealth generated from semiotic data by the large technology companies. I will examine the recent developments in digital technology and AI, with a view to understanding the functions of the current digital ecosystem and the semiosphere which results. This includes discussion of how semiotic data is collected and analysed topredict and control human behaviour, resulting in the “unauthorised privatization of the division of learning in society today” (Zuboff, 2019: 192). As Zuboff further explains: “technology only contributes to shared prosperity when it is tamed by democratic rights, values, principles, and the laws that sustain them in our daily lives” (preface to Acemoglu & Johnson 2023). Within this context, I examine the role of cultural semiotics in shaping the future.
References:
Acemoglu, D & Johnson, S. (2023). Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity. London: Basic Books.
O’Halloran, K. L. (2023). Meaning, Matter and Semiotics. Visual Communication, 22(1). Special Issue: 20 Years of Visual Communication, edited by Louise Ravelli, Janina Wildfeuer et al.
Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. New York: Public Affairs.
In his lecture, Professor Kress will discuss the traces of past frames and their continuing limiting effects on present understandings. His concept of ‘semiotic work’ expands the traditional understanding of learning and communication. The central thesis of the lecture is that communication is always also learning.
Gunther Kress is Professor of Semiotics and Education at University College London, University of London. His most important works include ‘Before Writing: Rethinking the Paths to Literacy’, ‘Literacy in the New Media Age’, and ‘Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design’, co-authored with Theo van Leeuwen.
John Hartley “Understanding Social Media: The Turn To Evolution, Complexity and ´The Three Bigs`”
Renowned media scholar John Hartley has drawn on semiotic approaches throughout his career, beginning with his influential book Reading Television (1978), co-authored with John Fiske. Currently Professor of Cultural Science at Curtin University in Australia, Hartley is the author or co-author of more than twenty books spanning media and communication, journalism and cultural studies. Lotman’s understanding of culture as a semiotic system has been an important influence on Hartley’s work, particularly his research on cultural industries, media and innovation.
Abstract:
Juri Lotman's concept of the semiosphere has proven highly influential in the study of contemporary popular media and journalism. His revolutionary proposition is that culture is a planetary system, like the biosphere or atmosphere. At the same time, semiospheres are scale-free and mutually interactive, bounded by border-zones of intensive semiotic energy (translation as conflict and cooperation). Culture as a system of systems operates at micro (agent), meso (institution) and macro (system) levels. This approach has two important consequences for the study of contemporary media. First, it reconnects media studies with the natural sciences. Second, it offers a model for understanding the globalisation of creative media, communications and everyday life in the era of the internet.
In this talk, John Hartley outlines the new ‘Cultural Science’ approach, following Lotman’s insights into the semiosphere and linking them to advances in evolutionary and complexity sciences. Here, creativity is not simply an individual attribute (talent) or output of firms (copyright). It is the production of newness in complex systems under conditions of uncertainty. Likewise, culture is not confined to professional arts and elite heritage. Instead, analytical attention shifts to ’the three bigs':
- ‘Everyone’ (populations not persons);
- ‘Everything' (creative productivity not just economic activity);
- ‘Everywhere’ (all countries and cultures, not just advanced economies).
This approach reveals the true scale, energy and potential (not to mention waste) of creative productivity. It also enables a coherent overall conceptualisation of the creative economy and culture. Here, innovation arises from cultural sources such as DIY culture, user-created content, network effects (including ‘creative destruction’) and the clash of systems. At the same time Cultural Science reintegrates humanities and the evolutionary sciences by investigating how ‘culture makes groups; and groups make knowledge’.
* The talk draws on John Hartley’s books: Cultural Science (with Jason Potts, Bloomsbury 2014); Creative Economy and Culture (with Wen Wen & Henry Siling Li, Sage 2015); and The Creative Citizen Unbound (edited with Ian Hargreaves, Policy Press UK, 2016).
Read an interview with Edna Andrews
Edna Andrews “The importance of Lotmanian semiotics to sign theory and the cognitive neurosciences”
Abstract:
Lotman’s contribution to semiotic theory, anthroposemiotics, the study of artistic texts and defining the relationship between language and culture represent some of the most powerful work produced within the Tartu–Moscow School of Semiotics. Key fundamental principles of Lotman’s theoretical work include a fully developed dynamic and interactive modelling of the semiosphere, the importance of acknowledging multiple (never singular) languages as minimums of semiotic meaning-generation, culture text-level generation of collective memory, and the ever-present tension in communication acts. These principles are essential in deepening our understanding of the neurological interface of language, memory and culture. This presentation will explore the importance of Lotmanian paradigms for understanding variation at the neurological level by examining human evolution of higher cognitive functions and cognitive neuroscience approaches to the study of brain and languages.
Edna Andrews is the Nancy & Jeffrey Marcus Distinguished Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies and Professor of Linguistics and Cultural Anthropology at Duke University, where she also directs the Linguistics Programme. She received her PhD from Indiana University and holds an honorary doctorate from St Petersburg State University.
Her major publications include Markedness Theory: The Union of Asymmetry and Semiosis in Language (1990), About Sintetizm, Mathematics and Other Things: E. I. Zamiatin’s Novel WE (1994, in Russian), The Semantics of Suffixation (1996), Conversations with Lotman: Cultural Semiotics in Language, Literature and Cognition (2003), and the edited volume A Calculus of Meaning: Studies in Markedness, Distinctive Features and Deixis (1996). Her most recent book is Neuroscience and Multilingualism (Cambridge University Press, 2014).
Her work in cognitive neuroscience and semiotics includes the articles “H.M.’s Language Skills: Clues about Language and the Medial Temporal Lobe” (2005), “Semiospheric Transitions: A Key to Modelling Translation” (2009), and “Language and Brain: Recasting Meaning in the Definition of Human Language” (2011).
Andrews’s current research also includes an extensive longitudinal fMRI study of second-language acquisition and multilingualism. The first article arising from this research, “Multilingualism and fMRI: A Longitudinal Study of Second Language Acquisition,” co-authored with C. Casabo-Voyvodic, J. Voyvodic and J. Wright, was published in Brain Sciences 3(2) in 2013. She also served as guest editor of a 2013 special issue of Brain Sciences devoted to the brain and language.
On 26 September 2013, Professor Andrews received Duke University’s University Scholar/Teacher of the Year Award from University President Richard Brodhead.
