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

Irene Blum, MA (Lecturer)

Irene holds degrees in communication and media from Copenhagen Business School in Denmark and Erasmus University, Rotterdam. At Copenhagen Business School, she studied English and Organisational Communication. At Erasmus University she has completed the master programme Master Media Studies, Media Culture and Society. Irene Blum obtained her degree from EUR in 2017 where she specialised in media and athlete activism.

In the year after graduating, Irene has worked closely with Dr. Isabel Awad and Dr. Jacco van Sterkenburg on publishing her thesis. She is currently doing research into sport, racism and social media with a focus on the United States. Additionally, she has participated as an expert in the European Erasmus Plus funded project BRISWA, which deals with the problem of racism in sports. 

Dr. Izabela Derda (Lecturer)

Izabela graduated at the Polish National Film School with a Master Degree in Film and TV Producing and received her PhD in Media Studies from University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Warsaw, Poland. In 2014 Izabela was a visiting scholar at Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism at University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

Her research interests lie in the investigation of media as a practice, transmedia storytelling, production practices, media branding and the influence of brands on the media landscape. Her PhD dissertation examines the development of branded content as a complex brand-consumer-medium process. Izabela is also a multi-award winning producer and advertising specialist. She has spoken on numerous panels and has sit juries of major advertising festivals including Cannes Lions, Eurobest, Cristal Festival and Clio Awards.

João Gonçalves, MSc (Lecturer)

João holds an MSc in Communication Sciences from the University of Minho (Portugal) and is currently finishing his PhD in Communication Studies at the same university. João is also a visiting scholar at the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas at Austin (USA).

João’s research focuses on political communication, news comments and artificial intelligence. His current PhD project studies how journalism conditioned news comments during the Portuguese Legislative Elections of 2015. Additionally, João has a broad interest in research methods and statistical analysis and is working on ways to use deep learning algorithms for automated content analysis.

Before joining the Department in September 2018, João was a doctoral researcher and a teacher at the Social Sciences Institute (University of Minho, Portugal). He also worked as an international relations officer at the same university early in his career.

Dr. Anna Hermans (Lecturer)

Anne-Mette completed her PhD on the representation and normalisation of cosmetic procedures within lifestyle magazines and advertising at King’s College London. As part of this PhD-project she advised government and industry experts with regard to proposed regulations. Moreover, she worked as a Graduate Teaching Assistant and Lecturer within various departments at King’s.

Anne-Mette’s background is diverse; she studied English Language and Culture at the University of Groningen before moving to London to complete an MA in Linguistics at University College London. Anne-Mette employs linguistic methodologies to explore (multimodal) texts and documents.

Phuong Hoan Le, MA MSc (Lecturer)

Hoan started her academic career at Erasmus University Rotterdam, where she earned her cum laude MA degree in the Media Studies, Media & Business track, and her MSc degree in Business Administration with the EUR Excellence Scholarship. Prior to this, she earned a BA in History, Media & Culture track, with honours. During her studies, she has been working as a Research Assistant for a few projects within the field of online corporate communications, corporate finance, and corporate governance.

Prior to joining this Department, Hoan has been a Lecturer at the Department of Communication Science at the University of Amsterdam, and was elected Student and Early Career Representative (two-year term, 2017-2018) of the Public Relations Division of the International Communication Association (ICA). She occasionally provides guest lectures at vocational universities within the field of digital marketing. Outside of academia, Hoan provided social selling workshops at Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Dr. Anne-Marie van Prooijen (Lecturer)

Anne-Marie will be teaching courses on quantitative research methods and corporate communication. Her research interests centre on organizational communication in new media contexts. Part of her research focuses on how online advertising strategies can impact consumer perceptions of the sincerity of organizational sustainability initiatives. In a different line of research, she examines the fading of boundaries between professional and private life domains due to the emergence of social network sites. Specifically, her research addresses which individual and organizational factors determine whether employees are willing to act as an ‘online ambassador’ of their organization by using social media to share positive work-related messages. Furthermore, she examines which processes underlie employees’ preference to separate or integrate their professional and private identities on social media.

After receiving her MPhil in in social and organizational psychology at Leiden University, she earned her PhD in psychology at University of Sussex. Her PhD project focused on the role of identity concerns in the acceptance of climate change information. She then worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management (Université libre de Bruxelles) as part of a research chair on prosocial consumer behavior, which was sponsored by Mars Inc. Prior to her present position at Erasmus University, she worked as an assistant professor in communication science at VU Amsterdam.

Anne Sadza, MSc (Lecturer)

Before joining the Erasmus University Anne Sadza worked as a lecturer in the department of Communication Science at Radboud University in Nijmegen, where she taught tutorials in several introductory courses for first year and pre-master students.

Besides her work as a lecturer Anne also works at the Netherlands Institute for the Classification of Audiovisual Media (NICAM) where she is a part of the Kijkwijzer team. Kijkwijzer informs parents about potentially harmful effects of movies and television shows by giving age and content ratings.

Her main research interests lie in entertainment media; specifically (the empowerment of) children and teenagers as young media consumers, risk behaviour in entertainment media and gender representation.

Dr. Michael Wayne (Lecturer)

Michael holds a PhD in sociology from the University of Virginia, USA. From 2015 to 2018, Michael was a Kreitman Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Communication Studies at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. He is currently a member of the Global Internet TV Consortium and previously served as the managing editor of the Communication Review between 2011 and 2015.

Michael’s research uses a variety of qualitative methods to address television industries, audiences, and texts from a critical perspective. His work has been published in Media, Culture & Society, Journal of Popular Culture, Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture, and Journal of Popular Television.