Dechun Zhang is PhD candidate at the Institute for Area Studies

More information about Dechun Zhang

My name is Dechun Zhang, a PhD candidate at the Leiden Institute for Area Studies (LIAS) in the Faculty of Humanities at Leiden University, Netherlands. My research interests are political communication, media and politics, digital politics, AI & Politics, and nationalism. My PhD project, “Rethinking China’s Digital Nationalism in the Wake of the COVID-19 Crisis”, focuses on how COVID-19 reshaped and influenced China’s digital nationalism, which is supervised by Prof.dr. Florian Schneider and Dr. Yih-Jye Hwang. I conduct research through both qualitative, quantitative and computational methodological approaches.

I am now the Managing Editor at the Journal of Comtempory Eastern Asia  and the Social Media Editor at the Journal of Visual Political Communication. I serve as a reviewer for various journals and conferences and act as an External Expert, evaluating proposals for the COST Action, which is part of The European Cooperation in Science and Technology. My studies also appear in serval journals, book chapters and conferences, including Journalism Practice, etc. You can check my updated CV here.

I was a visiting researcher at the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark and a visiting scholar at the Institute for Media and Communication Studies in the Department of Political and Social Science at Freie Universität Berlin in Germany (host by Prof. Dr. Barbara Pfetsch). I received my joint master degree from the Erasmus Mundus program in Journalism Media and Globalisation at Aarhus University in Denmark and the University of Amsterdam in Netherlands, with a research track in media and politics. I am now completing my second (online) master in Data and Network Analytics at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, Russia, and my research track is Computational Social Science. Also, I received my bachelor (Honors) degree from Hong Kong Baptist University in International Journalism. 

I also have journalism experience in Switzerland, Hong Kong, and Mainland China. I worked at EurAsia Info (Swiss) as a journalist. I interviewed the Chairman of the Governing Board of the Swiss National Bank and the Mayor of Zurich during Chinese President Xi’s state visit to Switzerland in 2017. I also worked as a Communication Assistant at The Charhar Institute (China) in 2016.