Director of the Centre of Discourse Studies, Teun A. van Dijk was professor of discourse studies at the University of Amsterdam until 2004, and is at present professor at Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona. After earlier work on generative poetics, text grammar, and the psychology of text processing, his work since 1980 takes a more critical perspective and deals with discursive racism, news in the press, ideology, knowledge and context.

He is the author of several books in most of these areas, and he edited The Handbook of Discourse Analysis (4 vols, 1985) the introductory book Discourse Studies (2nd edition, 2011) as well as the reader The Study of Discourse (5 vols., 2007). He founded 6 international journals, Poetics, Text (now Text & Talk), Discourse & Society, Discourse Studies, Discourse & Communication and the internet journal in Spanish Discurso & Sociedad (www.dissoc.org). He still serves as editor for Discourse & Society, Discourse Studies, and Discourse & Communication.