Maarja Ojamaa is the new Professor of the Semiotics of Culture

On Friday, 31 October, the University of Tartu Senate elected Maarja Ojamaa as the new Professor of the Semiotics of Culture.

Maarja Ojamaa’s main research interests include the transmedia mediation of culture, the meaning-making and usage practices of digital culture databases, as well as the semiotics of cultural education and cultural autocommunication.

During her application process for the professorship, she gave a public lecture titled “Culture as Education: A Cultural Semiotic Perspective on the Digital Age.” The lecture offered an interpretation—rooted in the Tartu tradition of cultural semiotics of culture as an educational mechanism. It focused on the digital age, characterised by screen mediation, transmediality (the transmission of stories and messages across different media—verbal, visual, auditory, etc.), the logic of databases, and shifts in part–whole relations. All these aspects significantly influence contemporary practices of memory and interpretation.

Maarja Ojamaa is a member of the Transmedia Research Group at the Department of Semiotics, which she has co-led with Professor Emeritus of Semiotics, Peeter Torop, since 2015. The broader aim of the group is to develop a methodology grounded in the Tartu tradition of cultural semiotics that helps interpret the complex mediation processes of contemporary culture across various media and discourses. Their work primarily focuses on Estonian cultural material and issues relevant to Estonian culture, but their findings are also broadly applicable in intercultural contexts. In addition to research, the group actively applies its results in education. This work has led to the creation of online learning environment for students, teachers and other interested parties—the Education on Screen that consists different sub-themes, such as: Literature on Screen, History on Screen, Identity on Screen, Nature on Screen, Estonian Film Classics and Dostoevsky on Screen. The group also provides professional development courses for teachers.

Since 2021, she has been a member of the international editorial board of the Cultural Science Journal. She has also been a member of the Estonian Semiotics Association since 2010 and served on its board from 2012 to 2014.

In 2020, she received the Estonian Semiotics Association’s annual award "The Semiotic Trace".