ECO, UMBERTO

(1932– )

   One of the world’s leading philosophers and a pioneer in the study of semiotics (the analysis of signs), Umberto Eco is that rarest of birds, a professor who is both internationally respected within the academy and widely read outside. Eco owes his popularity principally to his 1980 novel Il nome della rosa (The Name of the Rose), a philosophical “whodunit” set in a medieval Italian monastery that quickly sold more than four million copies in numerous languages and became one of the publishing events of recent times. Since 1980, Eco has published several other novels, which have met with less critical and public success, Il pendolo di Foucault (Foucault’s Pendulum, 1988) and Baudolino (2002) being perhaps the best-known.

   Professor Eco’s scholarly works have included monographs on the aesthetics of Saint Thomas Aquinas and medieval aesthetics more generally; the poetics of James Joyce; and, most famously of all, his several books on the theory of semiotics. He was the first Italian to give the Norton lectures on poetry at Harvard University in 1992 and also won the Asturias prize for Communications in 2000. Eco is also a columnist for the weekly news magazine Espresso,in which he has a platform for his witty, acute, and occasionally whimsical views on popular culture, politics, and contemporary life in general. Eco, who is a native of Alessandria in Piedmont, lives in Milan and teaches at the University of Bologna.