Brief Vita of Teun A. van Dijk

Teun A. van Dijk (1943) was professor of Discourse Studies at the University of Amsterdam until 2004. Since 1999 he is visiting professor at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona.

He took degrees in French language and literature at the Free University (VU) of Amsterdam, and in Theory of Literature at the University of Amsterdam (UvA), and received a doctorate in linguistics from the University of Amsterdam. He also studied in Strasbourg, Paris and Berkeley. His early research was about the linguistic study of literature, but soon changed to the development of "text grammars" and discourse pragmatics, later followed by research (partly with Walter Kintsch) on the cognitive psychology of discourse processing.

His work in the 1980s focused on two major areas, viz., the study of the structures, production and comprehension of news reports in the press, and the analysis of the expression of ethnic prejudices in various types of discourse (textbooks, news reports, conversations, parliamentary discourse, corporate discourse), with special emphasis on the relations between discourse structures, (prejudiced) social cognitions about ethnic minority groups and Third World peoples, and the ways "elite racism" is reproduced in (Western) societies. In the 1990s this work is being extended towards a more general study of the role of power and ideology in discourse and the reproduction of socio-political beliefs in society. His currents projects are about discourse, knowledge and context. He also directs an international project (with teams in Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, Chile and Peru) on discourse and racism in Latin America.

This research has been published in some 30 monographs and edited books, and in more than 200 scholarly articles. He holds two honorary doctorates and his work has been translated into a dozen foreign languages (including Russian, Arabic, Chinese and Japanese). Teun A. van Dijk founded the journal TTT (a Dutch linguistics journal) and six international journals, POETICS, TEXT (now called Text & Talk), Discourse and Society, Discourse Studies, Discourse and Communication, and the internet journal in Spanish Discurso & Sociedad of which he still edits the latter four. Teun A. van Dijk has lectured widely in Europe, the Americas, and other countries. He speaks Dutch, English, Spanish, German, French and Portuguese, and understands (and speaks more or less) Italian, Catalan, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian.

Teun A. van Dijk lives in Barcelona, Spain, since 1999.

His major books in English are:

Some Aspects of Text Grammars (The Hague: Mouton, 1972)
Text and Context (London: Longman, 1977)
Macrostructures (Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1980)
Studies in the Pragmatics of Discourse (The Hague: Mouton, 1981)
Strategies of Discourse Comprehension (with W. Kintsch; New York: Academic Press, 1983)
Prejudice in Discourse (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1984)
Discourse and Communication (Ed.)(Berlin: de Gruyter, 1985)
Handbook of Discourse Analysis (Ed.)(4 vols., London: Academic Press, 1985)
Communicating Racism (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1987)
News as Discourse (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1988)
News Analysis (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1988)
Discourse and Discrimination (Detroit: Wayne State U.P, 1988)(with Geneva Smitherman, Eds.).
Racism and the Press (London: Routledge, 1991)
Elite Discourse and Racism (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1993).
Discourse Studies, 2 vols. (Ed.). (London: Sage, 1997).
Ideology (London: Sage, 1998).
Racism at the Top (Klagenfurt, Drava Verlag, 2000)(with Ruth Wodak, Eds.).
Communicating Ideologies (with Martin Pütz & JoAnne Neff-van Aertselaer, Eds.)(Frankfurt, etc.: Lang, 2004).
Racism and discourse in Spain and Latin America. (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2005).

Context. A Multidisciplinary Theory. (In preparation)

For other publications, see his Publication List.

Mailing address:
Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Dept. de Traducció y Filologia
La Rambla 32
08002 Barcelona, Spain

E-mail: vandijk at discourses dot org
Internet:  www.discourses.org.