From May 27 to 29, 2026, the University of Bologna will host Inheriting Eco. Umberto Eco, the University of Bologna and all the knowledge in the world, a major international conference devoted to the theoretical, philosophical, narrative, and semiotic legacy of Umberto Eco.
Organized by the “Umberto Eco” International Centre for the Humanities together with several departments of the Alma Mater, the event already appears to be one of the most significant recent gatherings for Eco studies and contemporary semiotic research.
A quick look at the program is enough to grasp the breadth of the theoretical field opened by Umberto Eco. His work is explored not only in relation to narrative and theories of interpretation, but also through semiotics of culture, digital media, artificial intelligence, translation, aesthetics, pedagogy, and contemporary models of knowledge.
The three Umberto Eco Lectures delivered by Jean Petitot, Maurizio Ferraris, Alexander Stille, Susan Bassnett, Jacques Fontanille, and Laurent Binet already outline some of the conference’s major trajectories: the intellectual memory of Eco, the question of interpretation, cultural semiotics, the relationship with contemporary media, and translation studies.
Particularly relevant for contemporary semiotics is the remarkable number of sessions devoted to artificial intelligence and digital cultures. The program includes papers on generative AI, prompting, explainable AI, algorithmic hallucination, digital mediation, meme culture, social platforms, online semiosis, and artificial interpretative practices.
It is difficult not to see, in this convergence of themes, how Eco’s theoretical reflections continue to provide conceptual tools for understanding the present. Terms such as encyclopedia, model reader, abduction, open work, limits of interpretation, semiological guerrilla warfare, and unlimited semiosis recur throughout the conference, often reinterpreted in light of contemporary digital platforms and generative systems.
Semiotics naturally occupies a central position within the event. Alongside Jacques Fontanille’s lecture on The Semiotics of Culture in the Work of Umberto Eco, the conference hosts sessions devoted to the nature of the sign, inference, visuality, epistemological models, the history of semiotics, spatial semiotics, intersemiotic translation, and the limits of interpretation.
The conference also stands out for its strong international dimension. Scholars from France, the United States, Belgium, Estonia, Argentina, Mexico, Japan, Poland, Romania, China, Brazil, and many other countries testify to the extent to which Eco’s work continues to serve as a global space of intellectual exchange.
At the same time, the conference presents an image of Eco as profoundly contemporary. Sessions devoted to social media, meme culture, the manosphere, AI propaganda, data visualization, fandoms, video games, television series, and popular culture show how Eco’s semiotic categories are being reactivated within radically transformed media environments.
Another important aspect concerns the centrality of the Middle Ages within Eco’s intellectual work. Several sessions address medievalism, Thomas Aquinas, medieval semiotics, the problem of beauty, historical memory, and naturally The Name of the Rose.
For those following current developments in semiotics, the conference program also offers a kind of theoretical map of the present. Peirce, Lotman, Jakobson, Deleuze and Guattari, Ricœur, McLuhan, Popper, Ginzburg, and many other thinkers appear in direct or indirect dialogue with Eco’s work. The resulting image is that of a semiotics far from closed within a specialized vocabulary, still capable of engaging with media, politics, technology, education, and visual culture.
More than a commemoration, Inheriting Eco appears as a vast international laboratory devoted to the current destiny of semiotics and interpretation.
The full conference program is available on the University of Bologna website:
Inheriting Eco – Conference 2026
Source: Inheriting Eco. Umberto Eco, the University of Bologna and all the knowledge in the world, conference program, University of Bologna, May 27–29, 2026.