Michael Shapiro

Michael Shapiro was born in Yokohama in 1939 and grew up speaking Russian, Japanese, and English. He spent the war years in Japan before immigrating to Los Angeles with his parents in 1952. Through his father, Constantine Shapiro (1896-1992), he is a direct descendant of the founder of the yeshiva system of Jewish education, Hayyim of Volozhin (the "Volozhiner rebbe" [1749-1821]), and the last in a line of scholars that includes three eminent Russian-Jewish philologists: the verse theorist and comparatist Viktor Zhirmunsky (1891-1971), the belletrist and literary critic Yury Tynianov (1894-1943), and the Romanist Yakov Malkiel (1914-1998). In 1965-66 he was a postdoctoral fellow in linguistics at Tokyo University and spent the next forty five years in the United States as a university professor of Slavic and semiotic studies. He is the co-author, with his late wife Marianne Shapiro, of Figuration in Verbal Art (1988) and The Sense of Form in Literature and Language (2nd ed., 2009). His 2007 book, Palimpsest of Consciousness, is a commentary on his only work of fiction, My Wife the Metaphysician, or Lady Murasaki's Revenge.

Michael Shapiro is Professor Emeritus of Slavic and Semiotic Studies at Brown University and a member of the Society of Senior Scholars at Columbia University. His website is at www.marianneandmichaelshapiro.com. He writes a blog on American English at www.languagelore.net. The expanded second edition of his book, The Speaking Self: Language Lore and English Usage, was published by Springer in 2017. His newest book, The Logic of Language: A Semiotic Study of Speech, was published in 2022.