Dr César Jiménez-Martínez is Assistant Professor in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE, where he also serves as Programme Director for the MSc Strategic Communications (retitled MSc Strategic Communications and Society from 2024/25 onwards).
His research examines the mediated visibility of personal and collective identities, focussing on the construction, communication and contestation of nation-states in and through promotional practices. His work has made significant contributions to debates on mediated nationhood, especially digital nationalism, as well as nation branding, public diplomacy and soft power in the context of Latin America. Dr Jiménez-Martínez has highlighted inner contradictions and structural inequalities found in promotional practice, as well as how actors such as journalists, foreign correspondents and activists embrace, negotiate, or reject national brands, sometimes by adopting promotional tools themselves. More recently, he has started looking at how national identities are contested in and through the mediation of protests, as well as how national borders are constructed and challenged in digital environments by both public and private actors.
His latest book is Nation Branding in the Americas: Contested Politics and Identities, published by Routledge in 2025 and co-authored with Pablo Miño and Efe Sevin. He is also the author of Media and the Image of the Nation during Brazil's 2013 Protests, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2020, and co-edited with Professor Terhi Rantanen Globalization and the Media, published by Routledge in 2019. His work has appeared in journals including The International Journal of Press/Politics, International Journal of Communication, International Communication Gazette, Nations and Nationalism, Geopolitics, and Place Branding and Public Diplomacy.
His research has received several awards, including the 2023 Top Faculty Award Paper of the ICA Public Diplomacy Division (for ‘Threats, truths and strategies: The overlooked relationship between protests, nation branding and public diplomacy’, co-authored with Alina Dolea) and the 2021 Anthony D. Smith Award to outstanding article published in Nations and Nationalism (for ‘Digital nationalism: Understanding the role of digital media in the rise of ‘new’ nationalism, co-authored with Sabina Mihelj). His work was also second place in the 2022 Jay Blumler Best Article Award of The International Journal of Press Politics (for 'The instrumental mediated visibility of violence: The 2013 protests in Brazil and the limitations of the protest paradigm'), and received an Honourable Mention in the 2021 ICA Annual Conference for best paper in Public Diplomacy Interest Group (for ‘Soft power and media power: How foreign correspondents react to Brazil’s nation branding Initiatives’).
Dr Jiménez-Martínez is currently Chair of the Popular Media & Culture Division of the International Communication Association.
Prior to joining the department, Dr Jiménez-Martínez was lecturer at the School of Journalism, Media and Culture at Cardiff University, and postdoctoral researcher at Loughborough University. He received his PhD in Media and Communications from LSE, and holds a double MSc/MA in Global Communications from LSE and the University of Southern California.
Before becoming an academic, he worked almost a decade as a journalist for newspapers and television stations in Latin America. He also worked for Ogilvy Public Relations on different projects related with Nation Branding for several public and private organisations.