Teaching Staff

Chris Bail is Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at Duke University, where he directs the Polarization Lab. He studies political tribalism, extremism, and social psychology using data from social media and tools from the emerging field of computational social science. A Guggenheim Fellow and Carnegie Fellow, Chris's research appears in leading journals such as Science, The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Journal of Public Health. His 2015 book, Terrified: How Anti-Muslim Fringe Organizations Became Mainstream, received three awards and resulted in an invitation to address the 2016 Democratic National Convention. His widely acclaimed 2021 book, Breaking the Social Media Prism, was featured in the New York Times, the New Yorker, and described as “masterful,” and "immediately relevant" by Science Magazine.

Roberto Barbeito is Associate Professor of Sociology at the Rey Juan Carlos University in Madrid. He currently holds the Executive Secretariat of the Spanish Federation of Sociology and of the Spanish Committee for Research in Political Sociology. His main line of research includes democratic innovation -especially at the local level- and political communication, with special attention to digital technologies and problems related to socioeconomic and knowledge inequalities, with issues such as work, consumption, welfare, immigration, media and social media, climate change, and socio-political movements.

Full Professor in "Private Law" at the University of Bologna, PhD in IT Law.
Director of the Postgraduate Course in "Data Protection and Privacy Officer", Univ. Bologna.
At the University of Bologna, he taught and/or teaches "Internet Law", "Internet Law and (Torts related to) Computer Crimes", "Private Law", "Financial Markets Law",  and "Data Protection Law and Data Protection Officer". Visiting Academic at the University of Kent, UK (2019).
Lawyer, Privacy & IT Law Expert and Consultant.

Paolo Corvo is director of the sociology laboratory of the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo, where he teaches Travel cultures and Social Change and New Trends in the Food and Catering sector. His main lines of research include the social aspects of nutrition, tourism, quality of life, well-being and happiness. He attended creative writing and screenwriting courses with Francesco Trento and the Holden school.
Recent publications include: 2021, Il cibo nel fututo ("Food in the future", edited by, with M. Fontefrancesco), Carocci editore, Rome; 2018, Viaggi enogastronomici e sostenibilità ("Food and wine travel and sustainability"), FrancoAngeli, Milan; 2015, Food culture, consumption and society, Palgrave MacMillan, Basingstoke; 2015, Quando il cibo si fa benessere. Alimentazione e qualità della vita ("When food becomes wellness. Nutrition and life quality", edited by, with Gianpaolo Fassino), FrancoAngeli, Milan; 2015, Dimmi come mangi ("Tell me how you eat"), Terre di Mezzo, Milan.

Piergiorgio Degli Esposti holds a PhD in sociology and social policies and is an associate professor at the SDE Sociology and Business Law Department at the University of Bologna. For SDE, he is the delegate for internationalisation and scientific head of the computer lab. Since 2009 he is a member of the Prosumer Research Group, Maryland University UMD. He is one of the founding members of the Ces.Co.Com Advanced Study Research Center on Consumption and Communication. Since the fall of 2013, he is a Scholar in Residence at Duquesne University Pittsburgh, and he is a fellow in the international guest lectureship programme of Bielefeld University. 

Kornelia Hahn is Professor for General Sociology/Sociological Theory at the Department of Sociology and Cultural Science at the University of Salzburg which she is also chairing. She contributes mainly to the departmental research cluster Cultures of Modernity from a social constructivist perspective. Her research interest refers to transformations through media in (post) Modernity. Currently, projects and publications include theorizing phenomena and dynamics of the organization of (new) media communication, intimate relationships, body therapies and clothing. She received academic degrees (including habilitation) from the University of Bonn/Germany and awards for academic talks and academic publications from Leuphana University Lüneburg/ Germany.

Anne Kaun is Professor in Media and Communication Studies. Magister degree in Media and Communication Studies from the University of Leipzig as well as a degree in European Studies from the Technical University of Kaliningrad. In June 2012 she received a PhD from University of Örebro in cooperation with Södertörn University (title: Civic Experiences and Public Connection. Media and Young People in Estonia). In 2010 she was an associate research student at Goldsmiths College, University of London.  In 2013-2015 she was a visiting post-doc at the Center for Global Communication Studies at the Annenberg School for Communication (University of Pennsylvania). Currently, she is working in a collaborative project on Narratives of Europe. Between 2013 and 2015, she has been the Student Board Member of the International Communication Association (ICA). Since summer 2017 she is the vice-chair of the interest group on Activism, Communication and Social Justice within the ICA. Her research interests include media activism, media practices, algorithms, automation and artificial intelligence.

Martin Kenney is Distinguished Professor at the Department of Human Ecology Community and Regional Development Program, University of California, Davis. Prior to joining the UC Davis faculty as an associate professor, he was an assistant professor at Ohio State University. He has been the Senior Project Director at the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy for the last two decades and is now a Senior Fellow at the Research Institute for the Finnish Economy. Starting in 2017, he became an Affiliated Professor at the Instituto di Management at Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna. He was the Arthur Andersen Distinguished Visitor at the University of Cambridge and has been a visiting scholar at the Copenhagen Business School, Hitotsubashi, Kobe, Stanford, Tokyo Universities, and UC San Diego. His scholarly interests are in understanding the interplay between technology, academic institutions, finance, and competition in capitalist economies and how these dynamics affect people and places.

Geert Lovink is a Dutch media theorist, internet critic and author of Uncanny Networks (2002), Dark Fiber (2002), My First Recession (2003), Zero Comments (2007), Networks Without a Cause (2012), Social Media Abyss (2016), Organization after Social Media (with Ned Rossiter, 2018), Sad by Design (2019) and Stuck on the Platform (2022). He studied political science at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) and received his PhD from the University of Melbourne. In 2004 he founded the Institute of Network Cultures (www.networkcultures.org) at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (HvA). His centre organizes conferences, publications and research networks such as Video Vortex (online video), The Future of Art Criticism and MoneyLab (internet-based revenue models in the arts). Recent projects deal with digital publishing experiments, critical meme research, participatory hybrid events and precarity in the arts. From 2007-2018 He was media theory professor at the European Graduate School. In December 2021 he was appointed Professor of Art and Network Cultures at the UvA Art History Department. The Chair (one day a week) is supported by the HvA.

Gabriele Manella is Associate Professor in the academic discipline SPS/10 – Urban and Environmental Sociology, at the Department of Sociology and Business Law of the University of Bologna since 08/01/2017. He teaches Sociology of Territory and Sociology of Tourism and Territorial Development. He is a Unibo staff member for GRETA (Green Energy Transition Actions), a Horizon 2020 research program coordinated by Lapeenraanan-Lahden Teknillinen Yliopisto (LUT) since May 2022. He was a Unibo staff member for ROCK (Regeneration and Optimisation of Cultural Heritage in Creative and Knowledge Cities), a Horizon 2020 research program coordinated by the Municipality of Bologna from May 2017 to October 2020. He is the Board Coordinator for the Research Network RN37 - Urban Sociology of ESA (European Sociological Association) since September 2022. He also was a member of the board of the Territorio section of Ais (Associazione Italiana di Sociologia) from December 2013 to December 2019. He is the secretary of the Mediterranean Association for the Sociology of Tourism since September 2008.

Anna Montanari is Associate Professor of Labor Law and Social Security Law at the University of Bologna and hols a PhD in Labor Law at the University of Bologna, qualified to practice as a lawyer.
She is lecturer at the Master in Labor Law of the University of Bologna and at the School of Specialization for the Legal Professions of the University of Parma. In the editorial frame, she is member of the editorial board of the journals: ADL - Argomenti di law del lavoro; Work in public administrations; ILLEJ - International Labor Law E-Journal. Member of the Italian Association of Labor Law and Social Security (AIDLASS).
Her research field covers: National Agency for Active Labor Policies (Anpal); the system of social safety nets; the protection of the worker in company's transfer case; the labor market.

Jillet Sarah Sam is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur. In 2014 she receives a PhD in Sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park (USA) supervised by George Ritzer. Her research interest concerns studying how social groups use new media to identify themselves and incorporate it in their everyday lives. Her dissertation focused on the combination of caste and regional identity for the digital mobilization of Thiyyas. Since then she has started to examine ICT interventions in rural schools in Karnataka, in collaboration with Prof Amit Prakash (CITAPP, IIIT Bangalore). Apart from new media studies, she is also interested in studying social geography, and more recently in social and cultural gerontology.

After his PhD in Sociology in 2013, he had been involved in several types of research, collaborating with National and International research centers, such as CISET, the International Center for Studies on Tourist Economy of the Ca'Foscari University (Venice) and Climate-kic, the Europe’s largest public-private innovation partnership focused on climate change.
He has collaborated with the University of Bologna in several research projects at different Department, such as the Department of Sociology and Business law, the Department of Management and the Department of Arts. 
His main studies and interests of research concern mostly tourism and consumption, specifically about community-based tourism and organic products. These themes, as well as many more, are developed in several papers on National and International journals.

Joanna Szalacha-Jarmużek is a sociologist at the Institute of Sociology (Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun, Poland). Currently the Institute's deputy director. She specializes in economic sociology, neoinstitutional theory and qualitative methods. Her research focuses on the phenomenon of formal and informal networks in business and the institutionalization of new phenomena in economy, such as cashless payments and economic patriotism. She is the author of the first sociological analysis of the interlocking directorates phenomenon in Poland. Her studies of networks among Poland’s top 100 corporations were presented in a series of articles and book “Between trust and elitism. Interlocking directorates in Poland – sociological analysis” (published 2014 in Polish).

Shriram Venkatraman is an Adjunct Professor of Anthropology, Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, New Delhi (IIIT-D) and Adjunct Faculty at the Indian Institute of Management Kozhikode (IIM-K). Other than several peer-reviewed journal papers, he is also the author of a monograph titled 'Social Media in South India' (UCL Press) and co-author of a comparative book 'How the World Changed Social Media' (also UCL Press). He has taught several courses on Digital & Economic Anthropology and Digital Research Methods both at IIIT-Delhi and at IIM-Kozhikode. He has co-taught a MOOC course on 'Anthropology of Social Media' on Futurelearn. He has a PhD in Digital (Social) Anthropology from University College London, UK. He is also a trained professional statistician and has held leadership positions at Walmart, USA.