Charles Forceville

I am a Dutchman (b. 1959) with a French name working in a pragmatic, English research tradition. My expertise is visual & multimodal communication in general and visual & multimodal metaphor specifically. Genres and media I have (co)published about include advertising, animation, documentary, comics & cartoons, and pictograms. (Audio)visual storytelling as well as (audio)visual rhetoric have my strong interest. In my view "culture" is rooted in "nature," not the other way round, but of course culture and art are incredibly important objects and instruments of meaning-making processes. Therefore it is crucial that humanities scholars and scientists cooperate in the examination of gene-culture co-evolution.

Both in my teaching (in the Media Studies dept. at University of Amsterdam) and in my research I am committed to developing theoretical instruments and approaches that other scholars find useful for their own scholarly pursuits. Models and theories are tools that help achieve goals -- namely the answering of research questions -- and not goals in themselves. You can't teach brilliance; but you can teach systematicity and methods.

A quick, non-technical summary of Visual and Multimodal Communication (Oxford UP 2020), called “Relevance: the key to visual & multimodal (and all other) communication” can be accessed at https://semioticon.com/semiotix/2021/02/relevance-the-key-to-visual-multimodal-and-all-other-communication/ (SemiotiX: A Global Information Magazine (February 2021).