His PhD dissertation (VU, 1994), funded by the Dutch National Science Council (NWO) was published by Routledge (Pictorial Metaphor in Advertising, 1996). He did a post-doc on "Narration in Fiction and Film" at Leiden University and in 2009 co-edited, with Eduardo Urios-Aparisi, Multimodal Metaphor (Mouton de Gruyter). In 2008 he was Fellow, with Kurt Feyaerts and Tony Veale, at the Royal Flemish Academy (VLAC) in Brussels, Belgium, working on the project The Agile Mind: Creativity in Models and Multimodal Discourse. This project resulted in the volume Creativity and the Agile Mind, edited by the three Fellows (Mouton de Gruyter, 2013).

In 2017 he co-edited Multimodal Argumentation and Rhetoric in Media Genres (Benjamins) with Assimakis Tseronis. Currently, he is finalising a monograph with the working title Analyzing Visual and Multimodal Mass-Communication: The Relevance Principle for Oxford UP.

Forceville's teaching and research interests include multimodal metaphor & discourse in a variety of media and genres, including documentary film, animation, advertising, comics and cartoons. He is a strong advocate of combining text-based analyses (from 1987-2007 he regularly reviewed English-language fiction for Trouw) with pattern-finding, believing that this combination is essential to building bridges between humanities research on the one hand and social science and cognition research on the other. Forceville has given keynote lectures and seminars in many European countries as well as in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. For more information about Charles Forceville, please see link below.