Anna Maria
Lorusso

Anna Maria Lorusso is Full Professor of Semiotics at the University of Bologna, where she teaches Semiotics, Cultural Semiotics, and Semiotics of Journalistic Texts at the Department of the Arts, and serves as Director of the Master’s Programme in Print and Digital Publishing. She was trained under Umberto Eco, who supervised both her undergraduate and doctoral theses.

Her research focuses on information studies, memory, and contemporary media, with particular attention to truth politics, authenticity, reality effects, and the dynamics of manipulation and falsification in digital media and artificial intelligence. From 2017 to 2021, she served as President of the Italian Association for Semiotic Studies. She is a member of the International Umberto Eco Research Centre and of the Interdisciplinary Centre for the Study of Cultural Memories and Traumas at the University of Bologna. She has coordinated numerous national and European research projects, including projects on the right to be forgotten and on traumatic heritage and spaces of memory.

Her most recent publications include Post-verità. Fra reality tv, social media e storytelling (Laterza, 2018), L’utilità del senso comune (il Mulino, 2022), Dalla Storia alla memoria. Il discorso storico nei media all’epoca della post-verità (Mimesis, 2025), and Il senso della realtà. Dalla tv all’intelligenza artificiale. (La nave di Teseo, 2025).

Alongside her academic activity, she has also worked for over twenty-five years as an editorial consultant (first for Bompiani, then for La nave di Teseo) and as a translator from French.