Budapest, Hungary
DURATION
2 Years
LANGUAGES
English
PACE
Full time
APPLICATION DEADLINE
30 Jun 2025
EARLIEST START DATE
Sep 2025
TUITION FEES
EUR 2,500 / per semester *
STUDY FORMAT
On-Campus
* application fee: €150. Entrance exam fee: €100
Introduction
Semiotics is an ancient discipline with a long history, which has gained a firm theoretical foundation during the 19th century and an ever-growing significance over the last 50 years. This discipline is now in a period of very intensive, concentrated research and self-identification on the map of contemporary science.
The interdisciplinary Semiotics MA program at ELTE trains students to become well-trained specialists in the semiotics of culture with a global overview of the various fields of humanities: literary studies, linguistics, philosophy, visual arts, and general art studies – including approaches to the fine arts, films, theatre and music – and also the most contemporary methods of research synthesized from a semiotic methodological point of view. At the same time, by choosing the specific field for degree thesis students can gain specialized knowledge in one subfield of the semiotics of humanities (e.g., the literary, visual, musical, theoretical semiotics, and ethnosemiotics). The program is designed to be flexible to motivate students to find the best Hungarian specialists in the given field and assist them to become involved in international research and dialogues with foreign scholars and lecturers. The curriculum consists of courses on the history and theory of semiotics; language, communication, texts, and translation; theory of meaning, logic, argumentation; field studies of cultural, national, and special semiotic systems; various forms of applied semiotics and semiotic pragmatics in general. The program also puts emphasis on the preparation of students for PhD studies to plan their research careers.
Ideal Students
This program is recommended to applicants who wish to acquire skills for analysing processes of communication (mediation, translation) in culture and the results of these processes (texts, artefacts, events etc.) arising from the past and in the digital age, in a great variety of media and discourse representations to be described and evaluated as they constantly change through creative cultural interactivity.
Admissions
Curriculum
Strength of program
- An interdisciplinary orientation within the humanities.
- The application of the valuable research and methodological results of classical semiotics linking them to the most recent scholarly results in the discipline.
- Equilibrium in teaching semiotic theory and its implications in applied semiotics.
- Flexibility in encouraging students to find their own subfield by enabling their specialization (free option possibilities built in the curriculum).
- International context for research and education.
- Offering perspectives for students for doctoral studies in other directions, not restricted to semiotics.
Program Outcome
This program enables students to become versatile experts on culture, having substantial knowledge and competence in understanding, analyzing and influencing both general and specific cultural phenomena and the various forms of interaction and pragmatic exchange, and innovative system construction in general.
Career Opportunities
The labor market for specialists with an MA degree in semiotics includes job opportunities for experts who are expected to have the skills to:
- Understand current cultural movements.
- Grasp and describe the developmental logic in contemporary arts and the various forms of intercultural communication both within social interaction and national and international cultural texts.
- Interpret and describe different media and message transfer processes.
- Analyze conflict, argumentation systems, and philosophical discourse in any field which can be interpreted from the point of view of sign system constructions;
- Build models, typologies and create system descriptions.
Also, jobs may be found in fields linked to applied semiotics (e.g. sign system translation activities; analysis of behavior symptoms in the workplace; symptom-interpretation in various social or workgroups; activities for handling situations in spheres where special sign systems are involved, etc.).
Job examples
- Researchers at universities, in museums
- Copywriters, journalists, cultural critics
- Scriptwriters for video games; enterprises
- Translators
- IT specialists
- PR specialists