New Lecturers and Colleagues to join the Department of Media & Communication in September

Dr. Giulia Evolvi

Giulia is a Lecturer in the Department of Media and Communication. She holds a Ph.D. in media studies from the University of Colorado Boulder, U.S. During her Ph.D., Giulia was affiliated with the Center for Media, Religion and Culture.

Before joining the Department, Giulia worked as Research Associate in Religion and Media at the Center for Religious Studies (CERES) at Ruhr University Bochum, Germany, where she coordinated the focus group “Media and Materiality” for the Käte Hamburger Kolleg project. She also holds a Master's degree in Religious Studies from the University of Padua, and a Bachelor in East Asian Languages from Ca' Foscari University in Venice, Italy.

Giulia's research interests are religion and digital media, hate speech on social networks, mediation of religion and culture, social media and cultural identities. In 2018, she published the book Blogging my Religion: Secular, Muslim, and Catholic Media Spaces in Europe (Routledge). For more information on Giulia's research and teaching, please visit her website www.giuliaevolvi.com or find her on Twitter @giuliaevolvi

Dr. Leandro Lima

Leandro is a Lecturer at the Department of Media and Communication. Leandro finished his undergrad studies in Social Communication/Journalism and completed a Master Degree in Communication Studies at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), Brazil. Since 2019 Leandro Lima is a Ph.D. in Media and Game Studies, an award received at the Culture, Media and Creative Industries Department at King’s College London.

During his Ph.D., sponsored by a CNPq Scholarship, he organized the departmental International PhD Conference and taught several modules of the Digital Cultures BA Programme at King’s College. His main research interests lie in the area of videogame studies, digital media, politics and social mobilization. His doctoral research investigated the presence of political conversation in videogames culture through a case study of the Mass Effect franchise.

Dr. Radhika Mittal

Radhika is a Lecturer at the Department of Media and Communication. Her research focuses on communication around climate change and related adaptation-mitigation measures, particularly sustainable food practices. Prior to joining EUR, Radhika was a Senior Researcher and Project Coordinator at the University of Hamburg, Germany, organising a multi-disciplinary project titled Sustainable Lives: Food Choices as Politics and Lifestyle, to examine how society frames, engages with, and makes decisions about sustainable food.

Radhika’s PhD, obtained in 2013, through Macquarie University's Research Excellence Scholarship in Sydney, Australia, examined media discourses around climate-friendly food practices. As an Erasmus Mundus scholar sponsored by the European Commission, she studied for an MA in Media and Globalization from Aarhus University (Denmark), University of Amsterdam (The Netherlands), and Hamburg University (Germany), publishing research on how the Indian media frames climate change narratives. She also holds an MA in Mass Communication from Symbiosis University, Pune and a BA in Economics from Sydenham College, Mumbai, India.

Part of Radhika’s work portfolio includes research and training in strategic communication for public policy. She has held academic assignments with LBS National Academy of Administration, IIT-Delhi, Jamia Millia Islamia and TERI in India and consulted with the Commonwealth Secretariat and UNESCO, among others. Before academia, she has worked widely in the Indian media industry, gaining experience across print, television and advertising sectors.

Dr. Débora Antunes

Débora is a lecturer at the Department of Media & Communication at Erasmus University. She obtained her PhD in 2019 in Social Sciences – Communication at the University of Antwerp, where she researched social media and autism communities in Brazil. After her PhD, she also worked as a guest lecture at the University of Antwerp. Previously, she received her master in English, Rhetoric, and Communication Design at the University of Waterloo, in Canada, being also interested in digital practices, but with a focus on the rhetoric of cyber-activism.

Her main interests lie on digital existence and its association to health and disability, departing mostly from the perspective of citizens and the social constructions around health. She has also strong interests in digital methods and in rhetoric applied to objects of contemporary and popular culture. As someone who have been deeply involved with disability and activism during her research, she does not believe in the passive researcher and tries to find ways in which academic research can go beyond academia.

Jasmijn Ritmeester MA

Jasmijn will be working in the department of Media and Communication as a member of the Support Staff in the capacity of MA Media Studies Study Advisor. Previously she worked in the marketing and admissions department at University College Utrecht. She also studied Social Sciences in Russia, England and the Netherlands.

Bartosz Zerebecki, MSc

Bartosz G. Żerebecki is a junior lecturer and a PhD candidate in the Department of Media and Communication. He teaches introductory courses on research design and methods. In his academic work, spanning media studies and sociology, Bartosz focuses on sociability. He is interested in predictors and conditions, such as new media, which enable people to get along as members of society, friends, or fellow citizens. With the help of Polish samples, he studied how economic transformation affected materialist and humanist values among adults and, for the master thesis, examined the influence of social use of ICTs on friendship quality among preadolescents. During his PhD project, Bartosz wants to determine predictors of openness for diversity in Poland.

Bartosz holds a BA in Post-Colonial Studies from Brown University and earned a MSc in the research master program Sociology of Culture, Media and Arts from Erasmus School of History Culture and Communication.

Lijie Zheng, MM

Lijie is a lecturer at the Department of Media and Communication. She is involved in several courses regarding research methodology in the IBCoM-Bachelor programme, Pre-Master and Master programmes. Her main research interest focuses on the role media plays in global migration and family. Lijie is also enthusiastic in exploring newly emerged research methods and blurring the lines between quantitative and qualitative research approach.

Lijie Zheng is expecting to receive her doctorate from Utrecht University in Pedagogy. In her Ph.D. project, Lijie investigated how Chinese immigrant mothers (re)form their parenting ideas in the Netherlands from a perspective of social-historical dynamics while paying special attention to the influence of (social) media. Her research has been published in several international journals such as Asian and Pacific Migration Journal and Migration and Development.

Before moving to the Netherlands, Lijie has received her master’s in public policy with a focus on educational policies of ethnic minority children at Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China, and her bachelor’s in Psychology at the same university.