Thomas Hestbæk Andersen holds a PhD in linguistics (2003) and is an Associate Professor in Business Communication at the University of Southern Denmark. In collaboration with Gitte Rasmussen, he functions as Head of Research for RESEMINA.
Research areas
Thomas’ research focuses on social semiotic text analysis and text production, including explorations of the digital resemiotisation of interaction in/from organisations. He also investigates multimodal copy writing as well as multimodal discourse analysis. As basic research he has constantly been pushing the systemic functional description of the grammar and semantics of Danish.
Thomas has been a key figure in applying social semiotics to the area of business communication. Thus, he has developed models and descriptions based on social semiotics within the fields of copy writing, communication planning, web-based interaction (especially online shopping) and organisational credibility.
One of his proudest scientific achievements is the developments of a systemic functional description of Danish, which has served as the reference work for similar descriptions of Norwegian and Swedish.
Activities
Thomas is the founder and chair of the Nordic Association for SFL and Social Semiotics, reviewer of multiple articles for various journals and book publishers and has contributed with numerous monographs, articles, book chapters and conference presentations around the globe.
To find out more about Thomas, visit his official researcher page.