IAS Fellow at St Cuthbert’s Society, Durham University (October – December 2016)
Massimo Leone is Professor of Semiotics, Cultural Semiotics, and Visual Semiotics at the University of Turin, and is Director of the MA Program in Communication Studies. His work deals with visual embodiments of religion and law. He is particularly interested in comparative research about the visual imaginary of equity and justice. He graduated in Communication Studies from the University of Siena, and holds a DEA in History and Semiotics of Texts and Documents from Paris VII, an MPhil in Word and Image Studies from Trinity College Dublin, a PhD in Religious Studies from the Sorbonne, and a PhD in Art History from the University of Fribourg (CH). His doctoral dissertations focused on representations of religious conversion in early-modern hagiography and iconography.
Massimo Leone has single-authored seven books, Religious Conversion and Identity: The Semiotic Analysis of Texts (London and New York: Routledge, 2004); Saints and Signs: A Semiotic Reading of Conversion in Early Modern Catholicism (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2010), Sémiotique de l’âme, 3 vols (Berlin et al.: Presses Académiques Francophones, 2012), Annunciazioni: Percorsi di semiotica della religione (Rome: Aracne, 2014), Spiritualità digitale: Il senso religioso nell’era della smaterializzazione (Milan: Mimesis, 2014), Sémiotique du fondamentalisme : Messages, rhétorique, force persuasive (Paris: l’Harmattan, 2014; Arabic translation in 2015), Signatim: Profili di semiotica della cultura (Rome: Aracne, 2015); he has edited more than twenty collective volumes, and published more than three hundred articles in semiotics, cultural studies, and visual studies.
Massimo Leone was visiting scholar at the CNRS in Paris, at the CSIC in Madrid, Fulbright Research Visiting Professor at the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, Visiting Professor at the University of Tunis “El Manar”, Endeavour Research Award Visiting Professor at the School of English, Performance, and Communication Studies at Monash University, Melbourne, Faculty Research Grant Visiting Professor at the University of Toronto, “Mairie de Paris” Visiting Professor at the Sorbonne, DAAD Visiting Professor at the University of Potsdam, Visiting Professor at the École Normale Supérieure of Lyon (Collegium de Lyon), at the “Center for Advanced Studies”, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU), and at the University of Kyoto. He has lectured in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, and North America.
At the IAS, he will be working on a comparative study of the iconographies of the scales as visual symbol of equity and justice.