Professor Theo Van Leeuwen

Theo van Leeuwen was appointed Honorary Professor in the School of the Arts and Media, UNSW Sydney, in 2016.

He is Emeritus Professor and former Dean of Arts at the University of Technology Sydney; Professor of Multimodal Communication at the University of Southern Denmark, Odense; and Honorary Professor at the Australian Catholic University and the University of Lancaster, as well as a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

Professor van Leeuwen is a founding figure of social semiotic approaches to media and communication, and a founding editor of the international journal, Visual Communication.

His many books include Reading Images: the Grammar of Visual Design (with Gunther Kress; Routledge 2006); The Language of Colour (Routledge 2011); Speech, Music, Sound (MacMillan, 1999); Introducing Social Semiotics (Routledge, 2005); Global Media Discourse (with David Machin; Routledge 2007); and Multimodal Discourse: the Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication (with Gunther Kress; Arnold, 2001).

His current work encompasses the intersection of multimodal studies with organization theory, the affordances of online shopping, and the visuality of family planning materials across cultures.