Semiotics, a science and art primarily concerned with the interpretation of signs and symbols, is the field in which Umberto Eco has gained worldwide recognition as a man of science, a highly regarded literary artist, a philosopher of language, a novelist, and a scholar of the mass media.
Born in 1932 at Alessandria in Italy's Piedmont region, Eco spoke fluent English and French from childhood. Later he would introduce to Italy the analytic philosophy of the American Charles Sanders Peirce and the interdisciplinary orientation of the French structuralists Roland Barthes, Algirdas Julius Greimas, Claude Bremond, and Claude Lévi-Strauss.
An avid reader of literary works and philosophical treatises, he earned his laureate in philosophy at Turin in 1954 with a thesis on the aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas. Until 1959, he worked at the Italian radio-television network (RAI), at the same time forging rapidly ahead in a teaching career that has taken him from the Universities of Turin (1956–64) and Milan (1964–65) to Milan Polytechnic (1969–71) and the University of Bologna, where he obtained at the age of 39 the Chair of Semiotics that he still holds. Throughout these years, he was also very active in developing the new discipline of semiotics in specialized periodicals (as an editor of Il Verri; a founder of Marcatré, Quindici, and Alfabeta; and the director of Versus) and in publishing several major scholarly articles. He has served as president of both the International Association of Semiotics Studies and the Associazione Italiana di Studi Semiotici e Cognitivi