New lecturers and colleagues to join the department of Media & Communication in January and February 2022

Mark Bos

Mark Bos (1977) is a thesis supervisor in the Department of Media and Communication at Erasmus University. Mark studied Medical Biology and specialized in Communication and Education at VU University, Amsterdam. He did his PhD research on how people (young adolescents) without a science background inform themselves about innovative sciences (ecogenomics), including aspects such as the functionality of interactivity in this regard and the effects of framing/priming.

Mark is currently employed at the Freudenthal Institute of Utrecht University (three days a week) and works as a freelancer for various other organizations, among which The Hague University and the Erasmus University Rotterdam.

The publications of Mark are mainly in the field of information seeking and processing, but also in health communication and patient information. Current research is focused on framing of environmental communication in mass media and visual communication in science communication contexts.

Heath Broussard

Heath Broussard teaches the course Social Media Marketing to our Bachelor students as an external lecturer. He has spent the past 12 years exploring the future, shaping brand experiences, exploring business innovation and researching consumer cultures across both academia and the creative business industry.

A brand & creative strategist by trade - he has worked within both agency and brand environments across North America, Asia and the EU. Originally from Louisiana, USA - he completed a bachelors of Economics in his home state prior to moving to Europe to continue his studies.

After obtaining a Masters in International Business at Grenoble Graduate School of Business in France he moved to the Netherlands to begin his career within the Creative Business industry. Transitioning from agency work into his own consultancy studio - for the past three years Heath has consulted across the Cultural, Fashion, Beauty and Retail sectors - diving deeper into consumer culture, futures research and business innovation for a wide range of International Clients.

In addition to his strategy studio, he is also a visiting lecturer at various universities continuing his research and sharing his knowledge and expertise across a variety of fields that include : Social Media Marketing, Consumer Behavior, Community-Driven Innovation, International Marketing, among others.

Lis Camelia

Lis Camelia is a junior researcher at the department of media and communication. She has a bachelors degree from Leiden University in International Studies, with a focus in African affairs and relations. Here, she wrote her Bachelor thesis on the (visual) construction of hunger in Africa through global political images. Furthermore, she graduated with a master’s degree in Media, culture and Society at Erasmus University. Her Master thesis focussed on the evolution of the Dutch Caribbean identity through the cultural performance(s) of Afro-Caribbean Spirituality.

Her research tasks contribute to the Learning for Equality project, where she collaborates with dr. Isabel Awad, Mariana Fried and Wiebke Aepkers.

Hester Hockin-Boyers

Hester Hockin-Boyers is a Lecturer in the Department of Media and Communication at Erasmus University. Hester has a BSc (First Class) in Sociology from London School of Economics and Political Science and an MPhil in Gender Studies from the University of Cambridge. She was recently awarded a PhD in Sociology (funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council) from Durham University. Her PhD explored women’s experiences with exercise during eating disorder recovery and her research interests more broadly cohere around health, digital culture, sociology of the body, and gender. She also has expertise in qualitative research methods and is interested in new and innovative methodological approaches to studying new media.

More recently, Hester’s research has expanded to cover a range of new areas including; mental health and social media, civic engagement via the digital, and meme studies. As well as pursuing her research, Hester enjoys supporting bachelors and masters students with their own research projects.

Marco van Kerkhoven

Marco van Kerkhoven is a lecturer and researcher in journalism and media theory. He is specialized in quantitative research in media innovations, journalistic ethics, science journalism and storytelling.

Marco van Kerkhoven teaches at the master Media & Journalistiek at Erasmus University Rotterdam. He also teaches at Utrecht University of Applied Sciences and Delft University of Technology.

Marco van Kerkhoven obtained his PhD at the University of Amsterdam (2016) with a thesis on innovations in regional and local media. He previously worked as a science journalist and editor/correspondent for various media in the Netherlands and Brussels.

Freya De Keyzer

Freya De Keyzer is an assistant professor in Media and Business at the Department of Media and Communication at Erasmus University Rotterdam.

Her research interests are focused on the effects of (social) marketing communication on consumer responses, with a specific interest in the underlying processing mechanisms.

Freya holds a MSc in Communication Sciences (2012) from University of Antwerp. In October 2019  she obtained her Ph.D. degree in Applied Economic Sciences from the University of Antwerp. The topic of her dissertation was Brand Communication on Social Networking Sites. In 2020 Freya joined the Leuven School for Mass Communication Research to develop and test a prevention intervention to reduce adolescent’s smoking onset.

Freya has published peer-reviewed articles in renowned journals such as Journal of Advertising, Online Information Review and International Journal of Electronic Commerce. Her research has been recognized with best student paper award at the International Conference on Research in Advertising in 2019, Outstanding Paper in the 2020 Emerald Literati Awards. Moreover, Freya was Highly Recommended Recipient of the 2020 Emerald/EFMD Doctoral Research Awards in 2020.

René König

René König is a lecturer at the Department of Media and Communication at Erasmus University Rotterdam. His research focuses on the dynamics of digital inclusion and exclusion.

Prior to his employment at EUR, König has worked for over ten years in the interdisciplinary field of technology assessment, first at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna, then at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany where he was involved in a large research project on the societal impact of Big Data, funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research. After that, he worked as a stakeholder analyst and social media coordinator for the Canadian International Development Research Centre’s project Feminists Approaches to Labour Collectives (FemLab.Co).   

König is especially interested in online knowledge hierarchies and societal transformation processes related to the internet. He has conducted research and published on topics such as the platformization of scholarly communication, the politics of Google’s web search, online tracking and participatory knowledge production.

René has studied Sociology at Bielefeld University and is pursuing a PhD degree at the University of Stuttgart. More information and a complete list of publications and talks can be found at his personal website.

Soledad Monsalve Fonseca

Soledad Monsalve Fonseca is a lecturer in the Media and Communication department and also a PhD candidate for Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University Rotterdam. As a researcher, she investigates internal psychological mechanisms and the external triggers that shape the way people relate to what they consume. Her research interests include ontological insecurity, self-affirmation theory, protection motivation, and consumer judgment and decision-making. In addition, she presents at leading conferences in the field, such as the American Marketing Association Summer Conference.

Over the last several years, she worked in organizations as consumer behaviour and marketing adviser, setting strategies and planning campaigns to meet pipeline coverage and revenue goals. Furthermore, she created, tested, and scaled campaigns across multiple channels, including but not limited to SEO, SEM, socials, e-mail, etc.

She has been lecturing at Bachelor and Master programs since the 2018-2019 academic year, and holds a University Teaching Qualification from Erasmus University Rotterdam. She has an MSc in Communication Science, an MSc in Corporate Communication, an MPhil (Advanced Research Diploma).

Before joining the graduate program, she worked for more than ten years as an executive in multinational corporations leading global marketing departments. During her trajectory, she worked in the aerospace, defence, cybersecurity, healthcare, fintech, telecommunications, transportation industries, and public sectors.

Afrooz Rafiee

Afrooz Rafiee is a lecturer in the Department of Media and Communication at Erasmus University.

She conducted her PhD project at the department of Modern Languages and Cultures at Radboud University on ‘Comparative analysis of Iranian and Dutch crime news texts, images and journalism handbooks’. Her main research interests concern (journalistic) communication as a cultural practice regarding textual (e.g., text structure and linguistic) and visual stylistic choices, conceptions and expectations within and the variety therein across cultural contexts. She has published findings from her PhD project in international peer-reviewed journals. Recently, she is also involved in research on emotion representation and emotionality in journalistic discourse.

Afrooz Rafiee has worked as teacher for the course Science Journalism and, since 2015, has (co)supervised students for BA thesis groups ‘Stories in the news: Media, discourse and context’ at Radboud University. She has also supervised MA student assistants for different projects and studies, and has herself been research assistant for collaborative (NWO) projects at Radboud University and Ma Planck institute for Psycholinguistics. For these projects, she has also conducted fieldworks in Iran. At the department of Media and Communication, she will supervise BA thesis students for the theme ‘Media representations’ and teach tutorial classes for ‘Media systems in a comparative perspective’.

Currently she is finalizing her dissertation and designing a workshop for your journalists (to-be) with the NWO Valorization grant she received from the Graduate School for Humanities (GSH) at Radboud University.   

Serge Rijsdijk

Serge is an external lecturer at the Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication and at the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University. He also lectures Innovation Management at the School of Business and Economics, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

Serge is interested in the human side of innovation and focuses on the adoption of innovations and marketing communication of new product launch. In addition, his interests concern the management of dyads and networks for intra and inter-firm product innovation projects, and the individual characteristics of entrepreneurs. Serge uses experimental and non-experimental quantitative designs or combinations thereof.

His research has been published in the PDMA handbook of New Product Development and journals such as the Journal of Management Studies, Entrepreneurship: Theory & Practice, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Journal of Product Innovation Management, Marketing Letters, and Service Industries Journal. He also serves as editorial board member of the Journal of Product Innovation Management, which is the leading academic journal devoted to the latest research, theory and practice in innovation. His work received several awards from the Product Development & Management Association and from the Academy of Management.

Willemien Sanders

Willemien Sanders is a Lecturer at the Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication as well as at the department of Media and Culture Studies and an affiliated researcher at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry at Utrecht University. She also conducts research at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision. Her research interests include but are not limited to documentary film and non-fiction, film and television production, and digital humanities / data studies with a focus on questions of ethics, production cultures, and gender. She is currently a co-chair of the Media Production Analysis working group of IAMCR. She is also an avid traveler.

Livia van Vliet

Livia van Vliet is a Master Thesis supervisor in the department of Media and Communication at Erasmus University. Livia completed the International Bachelor of Communication and Media at Erasmus University, followed by an MSc in Media Technology at Leiden University. She is currently completing her PhD research on Politicians Twitter behaviour in the department of Sociology at the University of Amsterdam. Her dissertation is funded by an EU Horizons 2020 grant that looks at Opinion Dynamics and Cultural Conflict in European Spaces. As part of the dissertation, she has created the world’s largest database of politicians on Twitter, which is freely available for use at twitterpoliticians.org.

From 2015 – 2016 Livia worked as a tutor at the Erasmus University College in a broad range of classes, from Brain and Behaviour to Statistics and Data Visualisation. Her main research interests are in natural language processing and the analysis of social media data, although her publications are mainly in the area of Political Communication and Political Sociology. 

Yosha Wijngaarden

Between 2013 and 2019, Yosha worked as a lecturer and PhD candidate at the Media and Communication department. After finishing her PhD, she sought to explore the world (well… country). First as a postdoctoral researcher at ESHCC’s Arts and Culture department, and later as assistant professor Media Studies and Cultural Policy at Radboud University. Soon enough though, she realized that she missed the atmosphere, plenty of awesome colleagues, the high level of teaching and research, and the quality of the M8 coffee machine (ok, perhaps the last one not so much). So, she is absolutely delighted to return as assistant professor from mid-January 2022.

Yosha’s main research interest concerns (self-)organization in the creative industries. In her dissertation, supervised by Erik Hitters and Susanne Janssen, she studied whether and how working together made creative workers more innovative. As a postdoc, Yosha worked on a project on the income position of creative workers, as well as emerging earning models such as crowdfunding (together with Ellen Loots and Arjen van Witteloostuijn). Most recently, Yosha has been exploring collective and co-operative forms of self-organization in creative work – especially the music industry (with Kate Oakley and Helleke van den Braber).