You might recall that the inaugural Roman Jakobson Symposium launched in fall of 2019. The symposium draws on the legacy of former Harvard Professor Roman Jakobson to advance the study of language and sign-processes within the Social Sciences. The theme of that year’s symposium was Signs of Race, Racializing Signs, and featured scholars whose research unveiled the semiotic elements of racialization and racism that shape contemporary life and politics.
After a necessary COVID hiatus, the RJS is resuming this year as a series of seminars (rather than one big event), which are coordinated with the 2021-22 Harvard-Yenching Institute Program in Linguistic and Semiotic Anthropology that I am organizing. The first speaker in this series will be Franciscu Sedda,Professor of Semiotics at the University of Cagliari (Sardinia), who is spending a portion of the fall semester at Harvard as an Associate of the Department of Anthropology.