New PhD Student at the Department

Dear colleagues,

First, I want to thank everyone I have met thus far for being so kind and welcoming. As a newcomer to Aarhus, and to the department, settling in has felt easy, and I don’t think I have ever experienced being asked to drink coffee that many times a day.
I have joined the department as a PhD-student within the ROPH (Research on Online Political Hostility)-project. I am also a part of the Section for Political Behavior and Institutions and my strong team of supervisors is made up of Michael Bang Petersen and Martin Bisgaard.
The aim of my project is to understand how online audiences shape online political hostility. More specifically, I take a cognitive approach to investigate how the public nature of online interactions alter the structures of said interactions. And how these altered structures in turn might make it more difficult to reach mutual understanding.
I hold a master’s degree in Cognition & Communication from the University of Copenhagen, and I have a background in media studies. In a past life I also worked as a cabinet maker (møbelsnedker), but that’s a whole other chapter. During the past year I have been teaching full time at the University of Copenhagen, both at the MA in Cognition & Communication and at the BA in Film- and Media studies. I also managed to get to supervise and assess 11 master’s theses within the same year as I handed in my own thesis. I don’t know if that says more about my abilities or about the situation at the humanities at KU. In any case it was an educating head-first plunge into the teaching-related tasks a career in academia also entails.
I live on Nørrebro in Copenhagen with my husband and our 4-year old son. I take the early morning train into Aarhus every Wednesday and am here until Friday every week. As some of you will know, I’m expecting my second child and I will therefore be going on parental leave at the end of April. So, it’s a brief hello for now, but I will be back again – either with renewed energy, or very tired – next winter!

I look forward to speaking more with all of you.

All the best,
Esther