Zhe Xu
Welcome!
My name is Zhe Xu, and I am a Walter Benjamin fellow and postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Media and Communication at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, working under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Thomas Hanitzsch and Prof. Dr. Neil Thurman.
I hold degrees in engineering and media studies, and earned my Ph.D. in 2023 from the University of Cologne. While there, I served as a research and teaching assistant in media studies and received training in data science and machine learning from the Center for Data and Simulation Science (CDS) and the Department of Digital Humanities (IDH).
I primarily work in crisis communication through the lens of computational social science, studying how information and technology engage with global humanitarian crises and how public decision-making is shaped as a result. I also participate in human–computer interaction experiments led by other scientists to explore the potential of technology to cosmopolitanize humanitarian practices.
Please feel free to contact me via email or through my university profile.
News
- [Oct. 2025] I will be a visiting scholar in the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).
- [Sep. 2024] I’m thrilled to be joining the Department of Media and Communication at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich as a postdoctoral research associate.
- [May. 2024] I was awarded the Walter Benjamin grant by the German Research Foundation (DFG) (€221,430).
Selected Peer-Reviewed Publications
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2023
International Communication Gazette, 2023. Presented at the ICA 2023 conference (Toronto, Canada) and the ECREA 2022 preconference on the ethics of mediated suffering. -
2022
The Communication Review, 2022. Also in P. Reilly and V Salojärvi (Eds), (De)constructing Societal Threats During Times of Deep Mediatization. Presented at the ICA 2022 (Paris, France) and IAMCR 2021 (Virtual) conferences.
PI-led Project in Progress
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DFG
In this project, we present two papers that study news framing and political functions through a large-scale humanitarian news corpus, employing computational modeling and complex network analysis.
University Teaching & Supervision
- BA Communication Science, LMU Munich, 2025-2026
- MA Journalism, Media & Globalisation, LMU Munich, 2024-2025
- MA Chinese Studies & Media Studies, University of Cologne, 2022-2023
Expert Services
Grant, Report & Conference Reviewing
Czech Science Foundation (GACR) European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA) International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) International Communication Association (ICA) United Nations Network on Migration
Editorial Reviewing
Humanities and Social Sciences Communications (Nature Portfolio) Social Science & Medicine (Elsevier) Acta Psychologica (Elsevier) International Journal of Communication (USC Annenberg Press) Journalism (SAGE Publications) Journalism Practice (Routledge) Communication Quarterly (Routledge) Atlantic Journal of Communication (Routledge) Global Perspectives in Communication (Oxford Academic)
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