Susanne Janssen PhD

Professor

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Susanne Janssen is Professor of Sociology of Media and Culture in the Departments of Media & Communication and Arts and Culture Studies at Erasmus University Rotterdam. Currently, she serves as Chair of the Department of Media & Communication and as Founding Dean of the International Bachelor's in Communication and Media (IBCoM). She also directs the MA programme in Media Studies and the Research Master's programme in the Sociology of Culture, Media and the Arts at Erasmus University. Recently she has been appointed as an Honorary Professor  (2010-2013) in the Griffith Centre for Cultural Research at Griffith University (Australia).

Her research and teaching activities lie in the fields of cultural sociology, media and communications research, and the sociology of the arts and literature. Presently, she works on the completion of the research project Cultural Classifications Systems in Transition for which she received the prestigious VICI-grant of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). The project involves a large-scale, longitudinal and cross-national study into the social valuation of cultural products in France, Germany, the Netherlands and the United States. Since September 2010, she serves as director of an international collaborative research project on Popular Music Heritage, Cultural Memory and Cultural Identity, for which she has been awarded a major European reseach grant.

Susanne Janssen has performed a variety of executive and advisory services within the academic world and the cultural sector. She also was the main organizer of several international conferences. Currently, she serves on the steering committtee of the NWO funded research programme Cultural Dynamics, the Board of the ESA Research Network for the Sociology of the Arts (European Sociological Association), and the Board of the Netherlands School of Communications Research (NESCoR). As of January 2010, she serves as editor-in-chief (with Timothy J. Dowd) of Poetics. Journal of Empirical Research on Culture, the Media and the Arts.

Susanne Janssen holds an MA degree in General Language and Literature Studies and received her Ph.D. from the University of Tilburg (1994). Her dissertation research on processes of reputation formation and the role of reviewing and criticism in the field of literature was funded by NWO (Open Competition). She moved to the Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication at Erasmus University at the start of the Department of Arts and Culture Studies in 1989, where she was appointed Associate Professor in 1999, special professor in 2003, and Full Professor in 2007.