CMCS People

Kristina Irion is Assistant Professor at the Department of Public Policy and Research Director, Public Policy, at the Center for Media and Communications Studies (CMCS) at Central European University. She obtained her Dr. iuris degree from Martin Luther University, Halle-Wittenberg, Germany, and holds a Masters degree in Information Technology and Telecommunications Law from the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK. She has worked in the field of audiovisual media and electronic communications regulation and policy for ten years as an academic and professional.

Éva Bognár is Coordinator and Researcher at the CMCS. As Project research officer of the three-year European collaborative research project "Civicweb - Young people, the Internet and Civic Participation", funded by the European Commission's 6th Framework Programme, Éva ran the project with research assistant Judit Szakács for the CMCS between 2006 and 2009. Éva conducted the Hungarian research for the project BROAD (Broadening the Awareness in Data Protection), a collaboration between Hungarian and Dutch not-for-profit organizations. Recently she has been studying Hungarian minorities and their use of online space. Her background is in sociology.

Joost van Beek has been a research fellow at the Center for Media and Communication Studies (CMCS) at CEU since September 2009. Prevously, he worked at the EU Monitoring and Advocacy Program (EUMAP) of the Open Society Institute, and Mira Media, a Dutch NGO that promotes the representation of minorities in the media.

Amy Brouillette has been a Research Fellow at the Center for Media and Communication Studies (CMCS) since February 2011. Her current research involves examining Hungary’s new media laws in the European context. Amy has worked as both an on-staff and freelance journalist for more than ten years, reporting for daily, weekly and online U.S.-based publications. Her articles and photography have appeared in the Columbia Journalism Review, The Los Angeles Times and The Denver Post. She holds a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Colorado, Boulder (2007), and a master’s degree in Central European history from CEU (2009). In 2008, she was a visiting graduate student in Harvard’s Russian, Eastern European, and Central Asian Studies (REECA) program, where she studied post-communist media development in Central and Eastern Europe.

Paolo Cavaliere taught Fundamentals of Media and Communications Policy in the Media, Information and Communications Policy stream of the Department of Public Policy in the academic year 2011-12. He earned a Ph.D. in International Law and Economics at Bocconi University in Milan, Italy. His doctoral dissertation was on the economics and regulation of the media market. He also holds a law degree from the University of Pavia and an LL.M. in Public Law from University College, London. He has written about different aspects of media law, including “mediacracy” and the democratic deficit of the EU and pluralism. His primary research interests focus on e-democracy, regulation of media pluralism and the relationship between new media and politics. Prior to joining CEU he was a Teaching Fellow at Bocconi University and a Joint Visiting Researcher at University of Pennsylvania Law School and Center for Global Communication Studies, Annenberg School for Communication, in Philadelphia.

Lina Dencik is a research fellow at the Center for Media and Communication Studies (CMCS) and a Visiting Lecturer at the Political Science Department at CEU. She came to the CEU in May 2011 for a six-month stay. Her research focuses on news spaces and politics of the ‘global’. Lina's book Media and Global Civil Society is forthcoming in 2011 by Palgrave Macmillan. She has been a Visiting Lecturer at the Institute for Media, Arts & Performance at Bedfordshire University, an Associate Lecturer at the Department for Communication, Media & Culture at Oxford Brookes University, and a Visiting Tutor at the Department for Media & Communications of Goldsmiths College, University of London. At Goldsmiths College, she completed her PhD last year with a thesis on news practices and theories of global civil society.

Oliver Leistert joined the Center for Media and Communication Studies (CMCS) as a Research Fellow in May 2011, conducting research in the field of civil society and communications and privacy concerns. Specifically, he is looking at obstacles to safe mobile communications and the pros and cons of different on-line and mobile media tools for communication in protest situations. Oliver's book Generation Facebook. Über das Leben im Social Net (co-edited with Theo Röhle) was published in October 2011 by Transcript Verlag. Oliver is currently finishing a doctoral thesis on cybersurveillance and mobile protest media at the University of Paderborn, Germany. In his thesis, he examines what mobile media is used for, where it fails, to what extend it has an impact, how agency changes, how it becomes a danger for protesters, and what repression may follow its use, as well as further questions, drawing from 50 interviews collected around the world.

Peter Molnar is Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Media and Communication Studies at Central European University, a writer and activist, from 1990 to 1998 a member of the Hungarian Parliament, one of the drafters of the 1996 Hungarian media law, legislative advisor since 2002, has taught and lectured at numerous universities around the world since 1994. In 2007, the staged version of his novel, Searchers, won awards for best alternative play and best independent play in Hungary. He is co-editor of The Content and Context of Hate Speech - Rethinking Regulation and Responses, Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Roxana Radu is a a PhD candidate in International Relations at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, University of Geneva and a Research Fellow at the CMCS. She holds a masters’ degree in Political Science from CEU (Budapest), where she received the Best Thesis Award in 2010. Prior to starting her Phd, Roxana worked at the Center for Media and Communication Studies at Central European University (CEU) as program coordinator and researcher. Her expertise includes citizen empowerment, democratic (e)participation, and social uses of new technologies. From March to October 2011, she took part in the Next Generation Leaders program of the Internet Society and collaborated extensively with the Education Support Program of the Open Society Foundations.

Rian Wanstreet began work as a Research Fellow and a Coordinator at the CMCS in September 2011. Her research focuses on Internet governance and regulation, Open Internet initiatives, spectrum regulation and the evolving role of the Public Interest concept in policy-making and regulation. She was an Erasmus Mundus Scholar from 2009 to 2011, has an M.A. in Public Policy from CEU, and an M.A. in Public Administration from the University of York, UK. Rian comes to CEU with ten years of experience working in Chicago with nonprofit and political organizations in media relations, policy development, legislative lobbying, program management, volunteer coordination, and donor relations. She also served in the Peace Corps.

Youngmi received her PhD from the University of Sheffield (UK) in 2007. Her main interests are in comparative politics, especially in the study of political parties and party systems, governance and governability, and comparative regionalism. Youngmi was previously Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, and has taught at University College Dublin, Ireland. She has been the recipient of several grants, including from the Economic and Social Research Council, the British Academy, the Leverhulme Trust, the Japan Foundation, and the Korea Foundation. Youngmi has taught on East Asian politics, Europe-Asia relations, Comparative Political Institutions, Public Administration, Ethics and Public Policy, and China’s foreign policy. Her current research explores the role of information technology in political activism, and the impact of political culture on political behaviour. Her recent and forthcoming publications include Between Institutions and Culture: The Politics of Coalition and Governability in South Korea (Routledge, 2011), Intra-party politics and minority coalition government in South Korea (Japanese Journal of Political Science, 2008), and Pathologies or Progress? Evaluating the effects of Divided Government and Party Volatility (Japanese Journal of Political Science, 2008, co-authored with F. Yap). At CEU Youngmi teaches courses on East Asia in International Relations and Comparative Regionalism in IRES, and Comparative Political Institutions and Global Cities in DPP. Youngmi is the Director of the Global E-School Project on Korean Studies in Eurasia (2012-2017), coordinated by CEU and funded by the Korea Foundation, and was Co-Director of the 2012 Summer School on Comparative Regionalisms at CEU.

Marsha Siefert began teaching courses in international communication and oral history at CEU in 1996. Her research focuses on cultural and communications history, with current projects on nineteenth-century imperial telecommunications networks and film cultures in the Cold War.

Tamara's work is focused on teaching and research that are respectively geared toward innovative student-centered learning and action research useful for understanding and supporting social movements for environmental and social justice. In addition to directing the doctoral program in her department and supporting the CEU Sustainability Advisory Committee and the Sustainable Campus Initiative, she is co-founder of the Environmental and Social Justice Action Research Group (ACT JUST). ACT JUST involves learning forums and research on the relationship between everyday living, the environment, and social, economic, and political forces. The courses she teaches include: Environmental Politics, Qualitative Research Methods, and Disciplinary Approaches to Environmental Problems.

Gabor's research interest is primarily in the interaction between voting behavior and the performance of democratic institutions. He is also interested in public opinion, survey methodology, and East European politics. He is co-author of Post-Communist Party Systems: Competition, Representation, and Inter-Party Cooperation (Cambridge University Press, 1999), and author or co-author of over five dozen articles on electoral behaviour, public opinion, political parties and democratic consolidation in edited volumes, political science and sociology journals.

Renáta Uitz is Head of the Department of Legal Studies, and Chair of the Comparative Constitutional Law program. Her teaching covers subjects in comparative constitutional law in Europe and North America, transitional justice and human rights protection with special emphasis on the enforcement of constitutional rights and on issues of bodily privacy and sexuality.

Dr Vedres teaches sociology at CEU since January 2004. My primary interests are economic sociology, social networks, historical sociology, postsocialism, and methods. I received his PhD in sociology from Columbia University. This is a link to my website.