Susan Petrilli

Susan Petrilli (born 3 November 1954) is an Italian semiotician, professor of philosophy and theory of languages at the University of Bari, Aldo Moro, Italy, and the seventh Thomas A. Sebeok Fellow of the Semiotic Society of America.

She is also International Visiting Research Fellow at the School of Psychology, the University of Adelaide, South Australia.

Petrilli is a leading scholar in semiotics.

She has been a central figure in the recent recognition by semioticians that Victoria Lady Welby acted as the foremother of modern semiotics, alongside Charles Peirce, its forefather.

Ferruccio Rossi-Landi commissioned Petrilli to write on Victoria Welby, for the Walter Schmitz volume Essays in Significs (1990).

Sebeok thereafter invited her to examine the role played by Women in Semiotics, notably Victoria Lady Welby.

What initially began as a short chapter on Welby, turned into years of archival research and a monumental book on Welby's published works and letters, namely Signifying and Understanding: Reading the Works of Victoria Welby and the Signific Movement. For this work, Petrilli consulted the Welby archives at York University, Toronto, Canada, the Lady Welby Library, University of London Library, and the British Library in London, United Kingdom.

Welby's epistolary work was extensive, as she shared and tested ideas with approximately 460 contemporary semioticians and scholars.

Paul Cobley remarked: ‘Petrilli’s odyssey (…) has taken her from Australia to Italy, from a PhD thesis idea to the depths of the archives, and now to a future for a politically inflected, ethnically permeated, semiotics’.

Petrilli's book on Welby led to a special issue dedicated to Victoria Welby in the Semiotica Journal, co-directed by Petrilli, which brought together articles written by 35 authors.

As noted by the late John Deely: ‘It is more than fitting that Susan Petrilli, who pioneered the development of semioethics within the major tradition of semiotics, is the one to whom Victoria Welby is indebted for being brought to the center stage of this major development’.

Petrilli was awarded the 7th Thomas A. Sebeok Fellow of the Semiotic Society of America in 2008, the tri-annual award for excellence in scholarship and contribution to the development of the doctrine of signs, for originality in research and for contributing to the circulation of semiotic studies internationally.

She became Fellow of the International Communicology Institute in 2008, as among the top 100 scholars at a world level who have most influenced and guided studies in the field of “communicology”.

Petrilli's book, Signifying and Understanding: Reading the Works of Victoria Welby and the Signific Movement (2009), underscored the invaluable contribution made by Welby to semiotics, her development of the ‘significs’ theory, and the influence her theory and published works bore on contemporary semioticians such as Peirce, Ogden and Vailati.

Petrilli devised, along with Augusto Ponzio, the theory of ‘semioethics’, located at the intersection of semiotics and ethics.

This theory has been applied and reinterpreted in various scholarly fields, including law, medicine, language, communication, and architecture.

She published over one hundred books and peer-reviewed articles in the field of semiotics and philosophy of language, in both English and Italian.

Her works have been translated into several languages, such as Mandarin Chinese, French, German, Greek, Portuguese, Serbian and Spanish.

She was recognized as a leading modern semiotician under “Susan Petrilli,” entry by Paul Cobley (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Semiotics, London, Routledge, 2010.

Petrilli's semioethics theory has been applied and discussed in over thirty five recently published essays and articles, including fifteen published in the American Journal of Semiotics since 2013, sixteen published in Semiotica since 2004, and others published in New Formations, Sign System Studies, Language and Dialogue, and in the legal field, notably in the International Journal for the Semiotics of Law, and the Cambridge International Law Journal, as it pertains to human rights and international law.

Regarding her theory, Petrilli explains:"Semioethics is not intended as a new branch of semiotics, but rather it refers to the human capacity for listening to the other, to the capacity for critique, deliberation and responsibility. Following Sebeok’s “global semiotics”, semioethics returns to the origin of semiotics understood as “medical sem(e)iotics” or “symptomatology” and, recalling its ancient vocation to care for life, thematizes the relation between signs and values, semiotics and axiology, semiotics, ethics and pragmatism."Ronald C. Arnett adds:"[Petrilli] contends that the primary task of semioethics in this historical moment is the detotalization of global communication production systems. She intends semioethics as a critical and disruptive force capable of questioning global communication systems that dominate this historical moment. Semioethics challenges the characteristic unreflective social development inherent in modernity’s love of process and procedure.

Petrilli connects semioethics to the mission of unmasking dominant ideologies that constitute globalized communication systems."