Professor Cobley joined Middlesex University in 2013. Previously, he was Professor of Semiotics and Communications at London Metropolitan University.
He studied at the University of Sussex and, later, at City Polytechnic. He taught part-time at numerous institutions of Higher Education in London and was an Educator at the Freud Museum for five years before becoming a full-time academic in 1992.
Single-author books
Co-authored books
Edited collections of original articles
Journal Guest Editorship
Edited collections of previously published articles
Refereed journal articles
Articles in books
Online bibliographical article (refereed)
‘Narrative’, Oxford Bibliographies in ‘Communication’ edited by Patricia Moy (Oxford University Press, 2016)
available at
DOI: 10.1093/OBO/9780199756841-0088
Anthologised articles
Modules taught:
over 40 at undergraduate and postgraduate levels
Semiotics (including biosemiotics, zoosemiotics and cybersemiotics), the work of Thomas A. Sebeok, Communication Theory, Narrative, Subjectivity, Popular Genres (especially the Thriller)
Doctoral students are welcome in all of the above areas.
Olteanu, Alin and Cobley, Paul , eds. (2023) Semiotics and its masters: volume 2. Semiotics, Communication and Cognition, 36 . De Gruyter Mouton, Berlin. ISBN 9783110799910
Cobley, Paul (2021) Global semiotics. In: The Bloomsbury Companion to Semiotics Vol. 1. Pelkey, Jamin , ed. Bloomsbury Companions . Bloomsbury, London, pp. 1-30. (Accepted/In press)
Cobley, Paul (2021) Introduction: Semiotic movements. In: The Bloomsbury Companion to Semiotics Vol. 1. Cobley, Paul , ed. Bloomsbury Companions, 4 . Bloomsbury, London, pp. 1-24. (Accepted/In press)
Cobley, Paul and Siebers, Johan (2021) Close reading and distance: between invariance and a rhetoric of embodiment. Language Sciences , 84 . pp. 1-22. ISSN 0388-0001
Trasmundi, Sarah Bro and Cobley, Paul (2021) A dialogue between distributed language and reading disciplines. Language Sciences , 84 . ISSN 0388-0001
Journal Editorship
Book Series Editorship
Editor Board Membership
Fellowships
9th Thomas A. Sebeok Fellow of the Semiotic Society of America, 2014-23
Professional Association Leadership
President of the International Association for Semiotic Studies (elected 2014).
Professional Positions