We welcome our new colleague Judith Möller! The internationally highly renowned communication scientist from the University of Amsterdam, takes over the professorship "Empirical Communication Research, especially Media Use and Social Media Effects" at the University of Hamburg in cooperation with the Leibniz Institute for Media Research | Hans-Bredow-Institut (HBI) as of 1 February 2023. She thus also succeeds Uwe Hasebrink. The position combines lecturing at the University's Institute for Journalism and Communication Studies and research activities at the HBI.
"With Judith Möller, we have been able to attract the perfect candidate for the professorship," says a delighted Wolfgang Schulz, Director of the HBI. "Her internationally highly esteemed innovative research work in interdisciplinary networks, her transfer-oriented science communication as well as her many connections to social and political practice represent a great enrichment for the research profile and the team of the Institute."
For Juliane Lischka, Professor at the Faculty of Business, Economics and Social Sciences and head of the appointments committee, Judith Möller is also the ideal appointment: "Both the Department of Journalism and Communication Studies and the University, as well as Hamburg as a science location, will benefit greatly from Judith Möller's excellent research, dedicated teaching and transfer activities for socially relevant topics. We look forward to intensified research collaborations between Journalism and Communication Studies and the HBI."
Judith Möller said of her appointment: "I am very pleased to continue my research and teaching at the University of Hamburg and at one of the best European institutes for media research. The central questions of our time need interdisciplinary, forward-looking and methodologically ambitious answers. The Leibniz Institute for Media Research excels at precisely this, and I am happy to be able to contribute my part in the future."
The professorship was newly advertised after Uwe Hasebrink's retirement in October 2021. The professorship entails extensive research activities at the HBI, but not an automatic membership of the board.
More about Judith Möller
Judith Möller is currently Associate Professor of Political Communication at the Department of Communication Studies, University of Amsterdam (UvA) and Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology and Political Science, University of Trondheim. She is an associate member of the Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR), the Center for Politics and Communication (CPC) and the Information, Communication, & the Data Society Initiative (ICDS).
Her research focuses on the effects of political communication, especially in social media. The focus lies on two questions: (1) the impact of personalised political communication on individuals and society as a whole, and (2) the role of (new) media in the process of opinion formation, especially as part of political socialisation processes.
In 2019, Judith Möller received a VENI Talent Track grant from the Netherlands Science Foundation (NWO). The project is entitled "Vocal, Visible and Vaulting? (Dis)connected Niche Audiences in the Age of Artificial Intelligence" and investigates the impact of algorithmic filtering systems and artificial intelligence on specific populations and niche audiences.
Her work has been published in numerous international journals. She is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Communication and Political Communication and an ad hoc reviewer for leading journals in the field.
The transfer of her research and collaboration with practitioners is of great importance to Judith Möller. She regularly participates in public debates or science festivals and is in constant dialogue with newspaper publishers, public broadcasters and media regulators. For the German media authority Medienanstalten, she contributed to an expert opinion on types of disinformation and misinformation, which looked at different forms of disinformation and their dissemination from a communication science and legal perspective. She is also regularly invited as an expert to meetings of media regulators and consumer and market authorities, such as the European Regulators Group for Audiovisual Media Services (ERGA), the European Platform of Regulatory Authorities (EPRA), Medienanstalt Berlin-Brandenburg (mabb), Landesanstalt für Medien NRW, the Swiss Federal Media Commission (EMEK) or Election Observation and Democracy Support (EODS).
