Gerard Steen is professor of Language Use and Cognition at VU University Amsterdam. He has held positions at the University of Utrecht and the University of Tilburg and taught graduate courses in Belgium, Spain (once in Madrid and twice in Logroño), Brazil, and in the US. He is currently director of the Language, Cognition, and Communication research programme at VU University Amsterdam involving over 40 researchers working on the role of language in effective communication.

Professor Steen directs a number of research projects on metaphor, including two projects sponsored by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research, one  on metaphor in discourse and one on visual metaphor. He is also the coordinator of the Pragglejaz Group, a small international network of ten metaphor researchers who have developed a method for metaphor identification. Next year he is chair of the eighth international conference of RaAM, the international association for researching and applying metaphor, which will be held at VU university Amsterdam from 30 June through 3 July.

Apart from many articles and book chapters, professor Steen has published fifteen books, edited volumes, and special issues of scholarly journals. Two of these have been translated into Arabic and Japanese. He is associate editor of Metaphor & Symbol and serves on the editorial board of five other international scholarly journals in language and literature. His main interests are metaphor, genre, and discourse, and theoretical and methodological issues in doing interdisciplinary work with psychologists and communication scientists. Most of these issues come together in his latest book, published with John Benjamins in 2007, entitled Finding metaphor in grammar and usage: A methodological analysis of theory and research. He is currently preparing another book manuscript for publication, with his metaphor research group, called A method for linguistic metaphor identification: From MIP to MIPVU, which will come out in the spring of next year, also with John Benjamins.