Department of Semiotics

What do we teach?

The department offers semiotics education across four curricula. Alongside BA, MA, and PhD programmes in Estonian, we run a full-time international Master’s programme in English and welcome international students to our doctoral programme, where doctoral candidates are employed as Junior Research Fellows.

The two-year Master’s programme in Semiotics provides an interdisciplinary foundation and a strong theoretical basis for applying semiotic approaches across a wide range of fields. It integrates core areas of cultural semiotics, biosemiotics, and sociosemiotics, and combines the major traditions of Ferdinand de Saussure and Charles S. Peirce with contemporary and innovative perspectives. Many graduates of the international MA programme continue on to PhD studies.

The PhD programme lasts for 4 years, including the publication and defense of the thesis. There are several ways to complete doctoral studies, though for all doctoral researchers, the doctoral supervision, research, and study opportunities are based on the same quality standards. Those accepted for a junior research fellow position have an employment contract with the university as well as a student status. It is possible to combine your day job and doctoral studies as an intersectoral doctoral researcher by doing research for a company or institution. In considered cases, it is possible to complete your doctoral studies as a student while continuing to work in a job unrelated to doctoral research. Read further about the doctoral studies career pathways.

To find potential supervisors, visit our staff contacts page to explore their research areas and supervision topics.

Centre for Semiotic Applications was established in June 2022 and it aims to promote the research and methods of semiotic applications and their practical use in the society. Semiotics can give an insight to the causes of misjudgement; provide methods to map contacts and conflicts within cross-species communication in cities; explain how meanings form and change when one cultural text is transformed into another (for example a novel is adopted into a comic book); provide a useful analyse for brand communication by explaining how different audiences interpret cultural signs and symbols.