Dr Matthias Revers

Profile

I joined the University of Leeds in January 2018. Before that I was a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the Institute of Sociology at the University of Frankfurt and Department of Sociology at the University of Graz. I obtained my PhD in sociology from the State University of New York in Albany (SUNY-Albany) in 2014, where I focused on cultural sociology and social theory. I’m a Faculty Fellow at the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University and a former Fulbright scholar.

Research interests

My previous research focuses on journalism and political communication. My book Contemporary Journalism in the US and Germany (Palgrave US) is a comparative ethnographic study of political reporters in the two countries.

I have published articles on journalistic professionalism, how journalists perform it, how it is affected by technological change, how Twitter in particular influenced spatial and temporal aspects of news making, on the adoption of technologies, and on the history of media sociology.

My current research encompasses several studies on political polarisation in contemporary democracies, including:

• the moral boundaries of speech (free speech/hate speech) 
• the establishment, use, enforcement, breach, and battle against inclusive language (and political correctness)
• the mediated experience of political antagonism
• right-wing political communication

This research involves mixed-methods approaches, including interpretive and statistical analysis, computational social science methods, survey experiments, qualitative interviews (incl. group interviews) and participant observation.

Qualifications

• PhD Sociology
• MA Sociology
• BA Sociology

Professional memberships

• ASA
• ICA
• BSA
• Editorial board Cultural Sociology

Student education

I am teaching in the areas in the areas history of communication, political communication and PGR training at the School of Media and Communication.

Research groups and institutes

• Journalism
• Media Industries and Cultural Production
• Political Communication

Current postgraduate researchers

• Ariadna Obregón
• Danilo Reuben-Matamoros