Dr. Theo Van Leeuwen

Biography

Theo Van Leeuwen is an Honorary Professor in the School of the Arts and Media at UNSW Sydney since 2016. He has held various positions including Emeritus Professor and Dean of Arts at the University of Technology Sydney and Professor of Multimodal Communication at the University of Southern Denmark. He is also an Honorary Professor at the Australian Catholic University and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities. Van Leeuwen is a founding figure in social semiotic approaches to media communication and has served as the founding editor of the international journal Visual Communication. His notable books include 'Reading Images: Grammar of Visual Design' (with Gunther Kress), 'Language and Colour', 'Speech, Music, Sound', 'Introducing Social Semiotics', and 'Global Media Discourse' (with David Machin). His current research interests encompass the intersection of multimodal studies with organization theory, the affordances of online shopping, and the visuality of family planning materials across cultures.

Research Interests