The book, which is just out last week, is published by Routledge. The project started life as Bien’s Honours Thesis (i.e. Senior Project) in the rhetoric track in 2017, and as one of Professor Burke’s research lines, and was expanded and deepened during her graduate studies to become a scholarly, co-authored, empirical book-length study with Bien as the first/main author.

Bien is currently a 2nd year PhD student at the University of Tilburg in the department of Communication and Cognition in the School of Humanities and Digital Sciences. She is part of the visual language research lab that is working on a project titled “Visual narratives as a window into language and cognition” . The project she is working on analyses whether there are cross-cultural patterns in visual languages around the world and to what extent those patterns then connect to the spoken language of the comic creators. Within this project, her PhD thesis research focusses on researching patterns of continuity and discontinuity in visual languages/visual narratives around the world, looking at how viewers comprehend such (dis)continuity.