Susan Petrilli is Professor of Philosophy and Theory of Language in the Department of Linguistic Practices and Text Analysis at the University of Bari, Italy. Her most recent publications include, in addition to numerous essays, Su Victoria Welby: Significs e filosofia del linguaggio (1998), Teoria dei segni e del linguaggio (1998), Translation Translation (ed. 2003), Linguaggi (ed. 2004), Ideology, Logic, and Dialogue in Semioethic Perspective (ed. 2004), Percorsi della semiotica (2005), Comunicazione, interpretazione, traduzione (ed. 2006); White Matters (ed. 2006-7), Philosophy of Language as the Art of Listening (ed. 2007), Tutt’altro. Infunzionalità ed eccedenza come prerogative dell’umano (ed. 2008), Sign Crossroads in Global Perspective (2008); with T. A. Sebeok and A. Ponzio: L’io semiotico (2001); with M. Danesi and A. Ponzio: La semiotica globale. Il corpo nel segno (2004); with A. Ponzio and J. Ponzio: Reasoning with Levinas (2005); with J. Deely and A. Ponzio: The Semiotic Animal (2005); with M. A. Bonfantini and A. Ponzio: I dialoghi semiotici (2006); with C. Caputo and A. Ponzio: Tesi per il futuro anteriore della semiotica (2006); with A. Ponzio: Signs of Research on Signs (1998), Fuori campo (1999), Il sentire della comunicazione globale (2000), Philosophy of Language, Art, and Answerability in Mikhail Bakhtin (2000), Thomas Sebeok and the Life Sciences (2001), I segni e la vita. La semiotica globale di Thomas A. Sebeok (2002), Semioetica (2003), Views in Literary Semiotics (2003), Semiotics Unbounded (2005), La raffigurazione letteraria (2006); Semiotics Today (2007), Fundamentos de Filosofia da Linguagem (2007), and Lineamenti di semiotica e di filosofia del linguaggio (2008).

Jeff Bernard is Professor at and Director of the Institute for Socio-Semiotic Studies ISSS, Vienna; the President of the Austrian Association for Semiotics; and the Secretary General of the IASS-AIS. His principal research interests include socio-semiotics, semiotics of culture, and theoretical semiotics. His major publications include Strukturen autonomer Kulturarbeit in Österreich (4 vols., 1990/1995), Modelling History and Culture (2 vols., co-editor; 2000), and Myths, Rites, Simulacra. Semiotic Viewpoints (2 vols., co-editor; 2001). He is the editor-in-chief of S-European Journal for Semiotic Studies, and co-editor of Semiotische Berichte.

Paul Cobley is a semiotician and communication theorist. He is an Executive Committee Member of the International Association for Semiotic Studies (IASS) a member of the Semiotic Society of America and of the Media Communications and Cultural Studies Association (MeCCSA). From 2000–2001 he was a member of the panel of judges for the Mouton d’Or Award and became chair in 2002. He also sits on the International Advisory Board for the Collaborative MA Program in Semiotics at the University of Toronto. His major publications include, in addition to numerous essays, The Communication Theory Reader (ed. 1996), Introducing Semiotics (1997, illustrated by Litza Jansz), The American Thriller: Generic Innovation and Social Change in the 1970s (2000), Narrative (2001), The Routledge Companion to Semiotics and Linguistics (ed. 2001), and (with Adam Briggs) The Media: An Introduction (2001). He is currently Reader in Communications at London Metropolitan University.

Vincent Colapietro is a Professor of Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University, USA. He is a specialist in Charles S. Peirce and more generally in pragmatism. His other major areas of research include semiotics, psychoanalysis, political philosophy, and intellectual history. His major publications include Peirce’s Approach to the Self: A Semiotic Perspective on Human Subjectivity (1989) and A Glossary of Semiotics (1993). He is currently working on a book, tentatively titled, Working through Differences: Rereading Pragmatism and Psychoanalysis.

Joyce Cutler-Shaw is an artist of intermedia, including drawings, installations, public commissions, and artist’s books. Drawing is her primary language, from two-dimensional pen-and-ink works on paper to their sculptural translations. Of her four public commissions since 1999, the most recent is as the design team artist with Wheeler, Wimer Blackman & Associates, Architects (1998–2002) for the new Mission Valley Branch Library in San Diego. She received a San Diego AIA design award for her eight-column Sycamore Leaf Canopy, one of her three permanent library installations. The project was commissioned by the City of San Diego Library Department and the City of San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture. Cutler-Shaw is the first visual artist to be appointed Artist-In-Residence, as a Visiting Scholar (1992–present), by the School of Medicine at the University of California–San Diego, and the first nationally to have such a medical school residency for an independent fine art project, which is titled The Anatomy Lesson, a contemporary re-vision of a traditional theme. She has exhibited internationally since 1972, with her works represented in both museum and library special collections including New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Albertina Museum in Vienna, the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., and the Wellcome Institute in London, and in California at the Getty Museum Library, the Athenaeum Music and Art Library in La Jolla, and the University of California San Diego Special Collections Library, which houses her archive.

John Deely is Full Professor of Philosophy at the University of St. Thomas, Houston. He is the author of many books in semiotics, including most recently What Distinguishes Human Understanding? (2002), The Impact on Philosophy of Semiotics (2003), and Four Ages of Understanding (2001). A third edition of Basics of Semiotics (1988) is forthcoming in Bulgarian, Estonian, and Italian. He was a close associate of Thomas A. Sebeok in the founding of the Semiotic Society of America in 1975, and has been the senior editor since 1981 of its Annual Proceedings volumes. Several of his books appeared in Sebeok’s Advances in Semiotics series with the Indiana University Press, including notably Introducing Semiotic: Its History and Doctrine (1982), and the classic anthology, Frontiers in Semiotics (1986), edited with Brooke Williams and Felicia E. Kruse. He has published since 1965 well over a hundred articles in a variety of journals and proceedings of professional organizations, including notably the essay on "The Relation of Logic to Semiotics" in Semiotica 35(3/4): 193–265 (1981), winner of the first annual Mouton d’Or Award as best essay published in the field. Most recently he has received the same award for his article "The Word ‘Semiotics’: Formation and Origins," Semiotica 146(1/4) (2003).

Barbara Godard is Associate Professor of English, French, Social and Political Thought, and Women’s Studies at York University, Toronto, Canada. She has published widely on Canadian and Quebec writers and on feminist and literary theory. As a translator, among other things she has introduced Quebec writers Louky Bersianik, Yolande Villemaire, and Antonine Maillet to an English audience. She is the recipient of the Gabrielle Roy Prize of the Association for Canadian and Quebec Literatures, 1988 and the Award of Merit of the Association of Canadian Studies (1995). She is a founding co-editor of the feminist literary theory periodical, Tessera, and has edited, among other things, the volume Gynocritics/Gynocritiques: Feminist Approaches to the Writing of Canadian and Quebec Women (1987). In addition to numerous essays on translation, her recent publications include Collaboration in the Feminine: Writings on Women and Culture from Tessera (1994) and Intersexions: Issues of Race and Gender in Canadian Women’s Writing (1996).

Marie-Christine Lala is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Paris III–Sorbonne Nouvelle, where she is Maître de conférences at the Centre de linguistique française. She is also Responsable de séminaire at the Collège International de Philosophie, in Paris. She is a scholar in the sciences of language, semiotics, and literature. Among her publications, she has authored several essays in particular on the works of Georges Bataille. She has taken part in seminars held in Amsterdam, Rome, Bari, Freiburg, London, Stony Brook (NY), and Paris.

Floyd Merrell is Professor of Semiotic Theory and Latin American Cultural Studies and Literatures in the Foreign Languages and Literatures Department at Purdue University, USA. In addition to other research interests, he is an interpreter of Charles S. Peirce, in relation to which he has published a series of major publications. The most recent include Signs Grow (1996), Peirce, Signs, and Meaning (1997), Sensing Semiosis (1998), Simplicity and Complexity (1998), Signs for Everybody (2000), Change, Through Signs of Body, Mind, and Language (2000), Tasking Textuality (2000), Learning Living, Living Learning: Signs, Between East and West (2002), and Sensing Corporeally: Toward a Posthuman Understanding (2003).

Augusto Ponzio is Full Professor of Philosophy of Language and General Linguistics and Head of the Department of Linguistic Practices and Text Analysis at Bari University, Italy. He is coordinator of a Doctoral Program in Language Theory and the Science of Signs which he inaugurated in 1988 at the same University. He is Adjunct Professor at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. His principal research areas include philosophy of language, general linguistics, semiotics, and theory of literature. In addition to editing and translating numerous volumes (over sixty), founding book series and journals such as Scienze umane, Athanor. Semiotica, filosofia, arte, letteratura, and Corposcritto, he has written numerous essays (well over three hundred) that have been published in journals and collective volumes. He has authored approximately 70 volumes, of which, some of the more recent include Production linguistique et idéologie sociale (1992), Signs, Dialogue and Ideology (1993), El juego del comunicar. Entre literatura y filosofia (1995), Sujet e alterité. Sur Emmanuel Lévinas (1996), La revolución bajtiniana. El pensamiento de Bajtín y la ideología contemporánea (1998), La coda dell’occhio. Letture del linguaggio letterario (1998), La comunicazione (1999), Enunciazione e testo letterario nell’insegnamento dell’italiano come LS (2001), Individuo umano, linguaggio e globalizzazione nella filosofia di Adam Schaff (2002), La differenza nonindifferente (2002), Il linguaggio e le lingue (2002); with M. Lomuto: Semiotica della musica, Graphis (1998), Tra semiotica e letteratura (2003), Linguistica generale, scrittura letteraria e traduzione (2004), Semiotica e dialettica (2004), Elogio dell’infunzionale (2004), The Dialogic Nature of Sign (2006), Fuori luogo (2007), Linguistica generale, scrittura letteraria e traduzione (2007), A mente. Processi cognitivi e formazione linguistica (2007); with S. Petrilli: Signs of Research on Signs (1998), Fuori campo (1999), Il sentire della comunicazione globale (2000), Philosophy of Language, Art and Answerability in Mikhail Bakhtin (2000), Thomas Sebeok and the Life Sciences (2001), I segni e la vita. La semiotica globale di Thomas A. Sebeok (2002), Semioetica (2003), Views in Literary Semiotics (2003), Semiotics Unbounded (2005), La raffigurazione letteraria (2006); Semiotics Today (2007), Fundamentos de Filosofia da Linguagem (2007), and Lineamenti di semiotica e di filosofia del linguaggio (2008); with T. A. Sebeok: L’io semiotico (2001); again with S. Petrilli: Thomas Sebeok and the Signs of Life (2001), I segni e la vita. La semiotica globale di Thomas A. Sebeok (2002), Semioetica (2003), Views in Literary Semiotics (2003) and Semiotics Unbounded (2005).

Thomas A. Sebeok (1921–2001) Distinguished Professor Emeritus in Semiotics and Linguistics at Indiana University, Bloomington, USA promoted the diffusion of semiotics world-wide through his editorial and organizational activities. He made a particularly important and original contribution to the development of semiotics on a theoretical level with his introduction of the concept of "Global Semiotics." He has written numerous essays and has edited a very long list of volumes beyond authoring many. His major publications have been translated into several languages and count such titles as Contribution to the Doctrine of Signs (1976), The Play of Musement (1984), The Sign & Its Masters (1979), I Think I Am a Verb (1990), Semiotics in the United States (1992), Signs. An Introduction to Semiotics (1994), The Sign Is Just a Sign (1998), Essays in Zoosemiotics (1990), Come comunicano gli animali che non parlano (1998), Life Signs and Culture Signs (1999); with M. Danesi: Forms of Meaning (2000); with S. Petrilli and A. Ponzio: Semiotica dell’io (2001), and Global Semiotics (2001).

T. L. Short is a philosopher of science and renown expert in the semiotics of Charles S. Peirce. He has authored numerous papers published in academic journals and collective volumes and won the Mouton d’Or Award (1998) for the best essay published in Semiotica. Journal of the International Association for Semiotic Studies. Currently he is Chairman of the Board of Advisors to the Peirce Edition Project.

Eero Tarasti is Professor of Musicology and Director of the Semiotics Studies Program at the University of Helsinki. He is also Director of the International Semiotics Institute of Imatra, Finland. He studied music at the Sibelius Academy, and then in Vienna, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, and Bloomington. He completed his PhD at Helsinki University in 1978 after studies with Cl. Lévi-Strauss and A.J. Greimas in Paris. He has lectured and taught in almost all European countries and Russia, the US, Canada, South America and Japan. He has held guest chairs in the universities of Paris I and VIII, Aix en Provence, Tartu, and Minnesota. He is honorary doctor at Indiana University (Bloomington), Estonian Music Academy (Tallinn) and New Bulgarian University (Sofia). His special fields are semiotics music, musicology and general semiotics. In relation to the latter he is developing a new approach entitled "existential semiotics." His main publications include 10 edited volumes in the series Acta Semiotica Fennica, about 300 scientific articles. Among his books published are Myth and Music (1979), A Theory of Musical Semiotics (1994), Heitor Villa-Lobos (1995), Existential Semiotics (2000), Signs of Music (2002). He has also published a novel Le secret du professeur Amfortas (2000).

Eila Tarasti, pianist and musicologist, graduated from Sibelius Academy, Finland, with piano as her major, in 1975. She studied music then she has studied with Jacques Février, Jan Hoffman, Miguel Proenca, Joseph Rezits, and Luba Edlina Dubinsky. She has given performances in Finland, Paris, Bloomington, Minneapolis, Rio de Janeiro, and made a South American tournée with a Finnish music program (1996). In 1998 she obtained her MA from the University of Helsinki, with musicology as her major. She is specializing in the music and life of the Finnish woman composer Helvi Leiviski. Her publications include essays about Leiviski and other Finnish musicians like Sibelius and Rautavaara. She has appeared as a conference speaker in international symposia and published articles on her studies. She teaches piano at the University of Helsinki and works as a research assistant at the International Semiotics Institute of Imatra.

Genevieve Vaughan is a free-lance researcher and writer. Her principal research interests include Marxism and semiotics, critique capitalism, of market and exchange logic, feminist theory, gift giving in language, communication and socialization, the relation between communication and mothering, peace and social change. She founded a multicultural feminist activist foundation to practice the values of gift giving. The Foundation for a Compassionate Society was in operation from 1987 to 1998, initiating, maintaining, and contributing to many innovative projects for peace and social change including the Feminist International Radio Endeavor (FIRE), located in Costa Rica, and Stonehaven Ranch, a retreat center in Texas. In 1997 her book For-Giving, a Feminist Criticism of Exchange was published. A video, Giving for Giving, is currently being made about her life. She travels widely, presenting her ideas in academic and activist forums, and is now at work on a collection of essays. She has also published a children’s book, Mother Nature’s Children, and a CD of her songs for peace and feminism, The Tree of Life.

Gloria Withalm is Scientific Civil Servant and Lecturer at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, Secretary General of the Institute for Socio-Semiotic Studies (ISSS), Vienna, and Assistant Secretary General of the IASS-AIS. Her principal research interests include general semiotics, media semiotics, film analysis, film theory, and self-reflexivity in filmic texts. Her major publications include Austrian Television and the Presentation of History: The Case of Österreich I (1992), Fernsehen im Fernsehen im Fernsehen ... Selbstreferentielle Zeichenprozesse (1995), ‘How did you find us?’— ‘We read the script!’: A special case of self-reference in the movies (1997), Commercial intertextuality (2003), Commercial-ization of filmic self-referentiality (2004). She is co-editor of S- European Journal for Semiotic Studies and of Semiotische Berichte.