Susan Petrilli

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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. 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.