Role
Full Professor of Semiotics at the University of Bergamo.
Bio
Valentina Pisanty is a full professor of Semiotics at the University of Bergamo. She has published essays on Holocaust denial, racism, political discourse, narratology, humor, the rhetoric of memory, and the semiotics of testimonies.
From 1999 to 2003, she was the editor and editorial coordinator of Accepting Diversity: a Handbook in Progress, an interactive manual on tolerance born from a project by Umberto Eco, Furio Colombo, and Jacques Le Goff for the Académie Universelle des Cultures in Paris. She occasionally contributes to the culture pages of Il Manifesto.
Her research interests include narratology and interpretative semiotics—the study of the mechanisms through which humans make sense of the world, experience, and texts—with a particular focus on memory and history. She has specifically studied the trivializing and sacralizing uses of the memory of the Jewish extermination, the interpretive strategies of Holocaust denial , and, more generally, the logic and rhetoric of anti-Semitic discourse and racism .