Ph.D., English - University of Oregon

M.A., English - University of Alaska-Anchorage
M.S., Environmental Education Administration - George Williams College

Biography

W. John Coletta, Ph.D., coordinates our university's Biomedical Writing Minor and co-coordinates our Environmental Studies Minor. Professor Coletta is a former President (2010) and Vice President (2009) of the Semiotic Society of America, and currently sits on the Editorial Board of The American Journal of Semiotics. He was recently a System Fellow (2009-2010 academic year) at the Center for 21^st Century Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Professor Coletta's principal research interests and topics for publication include Peircean semiotics ("semiotics" being the formal study of signs and codes); eco- and biosemiotics; biosemiotic criticism (a field he helped initiate—see citations in "Biosemiotic Criticism," by Timo Maran, in the Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism [ed. by Greg Garrard, 2014]); ecocriticism and postmodernism; the medical humanities, medical semiotics, and biomedical writing; the semiotics of visual intelligence (SVI); forensic semiotics; the history and representation of ecological and evolutionary thought; and the major British poet and minor naturalist John Clare. Professor Coletta also has a deep interest in the work of the late Italian semiotician and novelist Umberto Eco.

Coletta, who was born in Connecticut and grew up on Long Island (New York), evidently chose colleges topographically, as he holds a degree from each of four different time zones: a Ph.D. in English from the University of Oregon; an M.A. in English from the University of Alaska-Anchorage; an M.S. in Environmental Education Administration from George Williams College; and a B.S. in Recreation Education from the State University of New York College at Cortland.