Guest Researcher Programme

Spring semester of 2026

Martina Paulenová is a PhD candidate at Masaryk University's Department of Media Studies and Journalism in Brno. Her research focuses on political communication on social media, particularly political memes and their audiences. Having majored in Media Studies and Journalism and minored in Film Studies, Martina began researching political meme audiences for her diploma thesis. Inspired by the influx of political memes during the first wave of the COVID pandemic and the emerging left-wing radicalisation pipelines, she presented her early work on festivals and art-talks. Her thesis gradually evolved into a PhD research project, which continues to develop as she navigates the academic environment through presenting at conferences (ECREA & ECPR), workshops, and publishing articles (Popular Communication). In her work, she mainly aims to examine how political memes influence the engagement of regular social media users, and thereby gain a better understanding of how digital culture affects people's connection to the political.

Autumn semester of 2025 and 2024

Tatu Matilainen is a PhD researcher from Helsinki, focusing on journalism ethics and critical animal studies. He teaches courses on media and communication ethics and democratic theory. He has published articles titled “A Communicational Ontology Inspired by Peter Singer” and “Journalists as Gatekeepers: How Stories About Animal Suffering Are Created”, and he is completing a manuscript entitled “Journalism Self-Regulation and Animals: A Discourse Analysis of the Code of Ethics and Media Council in Finland”. Before his academic career, he worked as a managing editor of non-fiction books for nearly ten years.

Visiting PhD student spring 2025 (Feb-May)

Sara Góis is a PhD Candidate at the Institute of Geography and Spatial Planning, in the University of Lisbon, Portugal. Her PhD project is funded by a scholarship from the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology. Her research interests centre on tourism sustainability, tourism communication, city branding and tourism monitoring system to measure the effects of tourism in territories.

Sara Góis has a degree in Languages, Literatures and Cultures from the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Lisbon, where she specialised with a minor in Communication and Culture. Sara then went on to do a master's degree in Tourism and Communication at the Institute of Geography and Spatial Planning of the University of Lisbon, where she specialised in the topic of tourism sustainability with a master dissertation entitled: “COVID-19 and the public discussion on the sustainability of tourism: a comparative content analysis of the media in different European countries”. After her master's degree, she worked as a research fellow for 20 months on a project called “Monitoring systems of tourism activity” at the Polytechnic of Leiria, that aimed to create a tourism observatory (OTSCP registered in the INSTO network of UNWTO) to measure tourism’s positive and negative impacts in the Centre of Portugal region.

Autumn semester of 2025

Bo Feng is a Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of California, Davis. Her research focuses on technologically mediated communication in interpersonal and health contexts, with particular interest in how people seek, provide, and respond to social support in digital environments. Over the years, she has studied supportive interactions across diverse media, relational, and cultural contexts. She has published over 60 peer-reviewed journal articles and a number of book chapters. She recently completed her term as an Associate Editor for Human Communication Research. Her current research focuses on human–AI supportive communication, particularly how users engage with AI chatbots and companions in emotionally charged contexts such as mental health and wellness. She is also involved in projects that compare the relational dynamics of human–human and human–AI interactions in supportive settings.

Spring semester of 2025

David Coppini is an Associate Professor in the Department of Media, Film and Journalism Studies at the University of Denver. His research is in political communication and journalism, focusing on the relationship between political polarization, media consumption and media trust in the United States and Italy. He has worked on projects examining the quality of local news in Colorado and the level of trust towards news organizations in the state. At the University of Denver, he teaches classes in strategic communication, media and politics, and research methods. 

Autumn semester of 2024

Daniel C. Hallin is a Professor of Communication at the University of California, San Diego. In Spring 2019, he was promoted to Distinguished Professor for his extensive contributions to the field and years of service at U.C. San Diego. Hallin’s research is widely known in the Nordics and highly important to media and communication studies, not least media and health studies. He has written about the media and war, television coverage of elections, and the rise and decline of journalist professionalism. He is globally acknowledged for his attention to the comparative analysis of media systems, focusing on Western Europe and Latin America. 

Spring semester of 2024

Anne Nørkjær Bang is a PhD student from the Department of Culture and Language at the University of Southern Denmark. Her current research is situated within the research project ‘Endocrine Economies: The Cultural Politics of Sex Hormones”. Building on feminist STS and cultural studies scholarship, Anne’s PhD project investigates how the birth control pill is imagined in contemporary Denmark and the role sex hormones play in these imaginaries, as they unfold in mainstream media entries, creative workshops with Pill users, and in campaign material for new contraceptive startups, envisioning contraception ‘beyond’ The Pill.

Spring semester of 2024

Anette Grønning is an Associate Professor at the Department of Design, Media and Educational Science, University of Southern Denmark (SDU). Her research has focused on digital communication and social media, primarily in workplace settings. Her research interests include various aspects of digital communication such as mediated discourse, memory and temporalities, participation and social presence.

Autumn semester of 2023

Amalie Søgaard Nielsen is a postdoctoral researcher visiting from the Department of Design, Media, and Educational Science at the University of Southern Denmark. Amalie works on the HAIDI project – Healthy Aging in a Digital World with researchers from Lund University and the University of Eastern Finland. Her background is in healthcare digitization. This involves working with video consultations in substance abuse treatment in Greenland, mental health applications and internet-based cognitive therapy at the Center of Digital Psychiatry in the Region of Southern Denmark, as well as implementing electronic medical record systems in the Capital Region of Denmark.