Christian Katzenbach is Professor of Communication and Media Studies with a focus on media governance and platform economics at the Centre for Media, Communication and Information Research (ZeMKI) at the University of Bremen. Prof Katzenbach is head of the Lab “Platform Governance, Media, and Technology“ at ZeMKI and associated researcher at Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society (HIIG), Berlin. From 2008 to 2012, Prof Katzenbach was a research associated at the Freie Universität Berlin. He completed his doctorate there with a dissertation thesis on “Governance, Technology and Communication” (2016, summa cum laude). The thesis was awarded the two-year dissertation prize of the DGPuK and the dissertation prize Media-Culture-Communication. It was published in book form as "Die Regeln digitaler Kommunikation”.
From 2011 onwards, Prof Katzenbach established the Internet Policy and Governance research group at the HIIG together with Director Prof. Dr. Jeanette Hofmann. From 2017 to 2021, he headed (together with Dr Thomas Christian Bächle) the interdisciplinary programme area Digital at HIIG Society. From 2016 to 2020, Prof Katzenbach was spokesperson of the DGPuK’s section “Digital Communication”, and from April 2018 to March 2019 he represented the professorship for Communication Policy and Media Economics at the Free University of Berlin. In the academic year 2020-21, Katzenbach was a Fellow at the Canadian Institute National de Recherche Scientifique (INRS) and the Centre Interuniversitaire de Recherche sur la Science et la Technologie (CIRST).
His research examines the interrelationships of communication, technology and politics in the context of the digitalisation of society. The focus is on the conceptual and empirical investigation of the regulation and governance of the internet and platforms, the role of data, algorithms and infrastructures for the (re-)organisation of societal communication, as well as discourses and regulation of “artificial intelligence”. Prof Katzenbach leads large international third-party funded projects on these topics, funded by the DFG, the EU’s H2020 framework programme, the BMBF, the Volkswagen Foundation and the Federal Agency for Civic Education (BpB).
During his time at LSE, Prof Katzenbach will be working with Dr Jean-Christophe Plantin.