Francisco Chico Rico is Full Professor of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature at the University of Alicante. He has also taught and conducted research at the University of Trieste (Italy) and the Universities of Siegen and Düsseldorf (Germany), where he has taught History of the Spanish Language and Literary Theory and Comparative Literature.

His research interests include classical, traditional and modern poetics and rhetoric, text linguistics, literary pragmatics, literary translation studies, empirical studies of literature, interdiscursive analysis and cultural rhetoric. In these contexts, he has published more than 120 research works in the form of books, book chapters and articles—some of them published in German, Bulgarian, English and Italian—and has translated some works of the German theorist Siegfried J. Schmidt and the Hungarian linguist János S. Petöfi into Spanish.

He participates in the Scientific and Editorial Boards of six specialised journals, including ACTIO NOVA. Revista de Teoría de la Literatura y Literatura Comparada (Autonomous University of Madrid) and Rhetorica. A Journal of the History of Rhetoric (University of California), and co-edits, together with Prof. Dr. Pablo Schwartz, Hexis. Revista Iberoamericana de Retórica, co-published by the University of Alicante and the Ibero-American Organisation of Rhetoric (OIR).

He has been Spanish member of the Council of the International Society for the History of Rhetoric (ISHR), Vice-President of the Spanish Society of Rhetoric (SE-Ret) and President of the Ibero-American Organisation of Rhetoric (OIR).

He directs the Research Group "Studies in Literary Theory, Comparative Literature and Literary Translation Theory (TeLiCom)" at the University of Alicante and is a member of the Research Group "C[PyR] Communication, Poetics and Rhetoric" at the Autonomous University of Madrid.