Since the modern founding of the theory of signs by the American philosopher-scientist Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), the field of semiotics has become increasingly prominent as a method of interdisciplinary research and study, bridging the humanities, the fine arts, and the natural and social sciences. It is also truly international, with faculty representation at many universities, research institutes, and scholarly societies throughout the world. These two volumes reflect the continuing appeal of Peirce's sign theory bringing together as they do a great variety of authors from all over the world whose aim is to set the stage for a productive collaboration among linguists and cognitive scientists.
Michael Shapiro was born in Yokohama in 1939 and grew up speaking Russian, Japanese, and English. He spent the war years in Japan before immigrating to Los Angeles with his parents in 1952. Through his father, Constantine Shapiro (1896-1992), he is a direct descendant of the founder of the yeshiva system of Jewish education, Hayyim of Volozhin (the "Volozhiner rebbe" [1749-1821]), and the last in a line of scholars that includes three eminent Russian-Jewish philologists: Viktor Zhirmunsky (1891-1971), Yury Tynianov (1894-1943), and Yakov Malkiel (1914-1998). In 1965-66 he was a postdoctoral fellow in linguistics at Tokyo University and spent the next forty years in the United States as a university professor of Slavic and semiotic studies. He is the co-author, with his late wife Marianne Shapiro, of Figuration in Verbal Art (1988) and The Sense of Form in Literature and Language (2nd ed., 2009). His 2007 book, Palimpsest of Consciousness, is a commentary on his only work of fiction, My Wife the Metaphysician, or Lady Murasaki's Revenge.
Michael Shapiro is a member of the Society of Senior Scholars at Columbia University. His website is at www.marianneandmichaelshapiro.com.
