José van Dijck - Biography#

José van Dijck (1960) is a professor of Comparative Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam.

After completing her BA and MA at the University of Utrecht, she received a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD, 1992). Her graduate and postgraduate work was supported by Fulbright and AAUW grants. She was an assistant professor of Journalism at the University of Groningen (NL) and an associate professor of media and visual culture at the University of Maastricht (NL). In 2001, she became a professor at the Department of Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam, where she was chair from 2002-2007. Media And Communication at the UNiversity of Amsterdam is currently ranked number 7 in the QS-world ranking. She served as Dean of Humanities from 2008 to 2011. She was elected President of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2015.

José van Dijck was a visiting professor at Concordia University (Montreal); she was also a visiting scholar at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in the Science and Technology program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT, Cambridge), and in the School for Literature, Science and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Atlanta). In 2005, she was the Walker Ames honorary lecturer at the University of Washington (Seattle). During the Spring semester of 2012, she was a visiting professor at the University of Technology, Sydney (AUS). She was also a distinguished visiting professor at the Annenberg School for Communication (Philadelphia) in the Fall of 2013.

Van Dijck's research areas include media technologies, digital culture, social media, popularisation of science and medicine, and television and culture. Her latest book, titled The Culture of Connectivity. A Critical History of Social Media, was published by Oxford University Press (2013).