Michael Shapiro was born in Yokohama, spent World War II in Japan, and grew up speaking Russian, Japanese, and English. He earned degrees in Slavic Languages and Literatures at UCLA (A. B., ‘61) and Harvard (A. M., ‘62; Ph. D. ‘65). Besides Brown and Columbia, he has taught at UCLA, Princeton, UC Berkeley, and Green Mountain College, and has given over one hundred public lectures to academic audiences in the United States, Europe, South America, and China. He is the co-author, with his late wife the medievalist and Renaissance scholar Marianne Shapiro, of Figuration in Verbal Art (1988) and The Sense of Form in Literature and Language (2nd ed., 2009). An expanded second edition of his book, The Speaking Self: Language Lore and English Usage, was published by Springer in March 2017. His most recent book, published in 2022, is The Logic of Language: A Semiotic Study of Speech.
