UB's Gottdiener Will Present Keynote at International Conference on Urban Semiotics

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Internationally known semiotician Mark Gottdiener, PhD, of Buffalo, professor of sociology at the University at Buffalo, will be the keynote speaker at the International Conference on semiotics, "Urban Semiotics: City as a Cultural-Historical Phenomenon" to be held June 3-5 at the Institute of the Humanities, Tallinn University, Tallinn, Estonia.

His talk, "The Semiotics of Place in the Work of Jirij Lotman," will, like the conference itself, honor the work and memory of Lotman, a prominent Soviet formalist critic, semiotician and culturologist who founded the Tartu-Moscow School of Structural Poetics.

He was a man Gottdiener calls "a brilliant scholar whose wide-ranging work included books on the semiotics of the cinema, urban space and the artistic text, as well as literature."

Lotman fled Russia for Estonia in 1950 when Stalinist policy called for the persecution of Russian Jews. He went on to write more than 600 titles in his field and pioneer an approach to cultural semiotics independent of Russian structuralism, moving beyond static textual analysis to a dynamic grasp of cultural signification. He died in 1993.

Gottdiener has earned an international reputation as a Peircian semiotician of material and social life, who has long collaborated with Karin Boklund and Alexandros Lagopoulos, both of Aristotle University, Thessaloniki, Greece, with whom he co-authored the massive four-volume reference work, "Semiotics" (Sage Inc., 2003).

He is the award-winning author of many other books, including the pioneering "Postmodern Semiotics" (Blackwell, 1995) and co-editor (with Lagopoulos) of "The City and the Sign: An Introduction to Urban Semiotics" (Columbia University Press, 1986).

Gottdiener's semiotic critique of deconstructionism and discursive reductionism is well known in European semiotic circles and he is frequently invited to address audiences at European, Canadian and Middle Eastern universities and institutes.

Semiotics, the study of the sign systems that constitute human culture, has, since its discovery in the late 19th century and early 20th century, transformed the ways in which we think about culture and communication, has opened new areas of study and made fruitful connections between established disciplines.

The University at Buffalo is a premier research-intensive public university, a flagship institution in the State University of New York system and its largest and most comprehensive campus. UB's more than 28,000 students pursue their academic interests through more than 300 undergraduate, graduate and professional degree programs. Founded in 1846, the University at Buffalo is a member of the Association of American Universities.