Professor Sabina Mihelj

PhD (Ljubljana Graduate School of the Humanities)

  • Professor of Media and Cultural Analysis

Research groups and centres

Publications
Researcher ID Google Scholar

Sabina Mihelj is Professor of Media and Cultural Analysis in the Communication and Media Department, and a member of Loughborough Centre for Research in Communication and Culture. She is the author of several books and journal articles on media, politics, and culture, including Media Nations: Communicating Belonging and Exclusion in the Modern World (Palgrave, 2011), From Media Systems to Media Cultures: Understanding Socialist Television, (Cambridge University Press, 2018, with S. Huxtable) and The Illiberal Public Sphere: Media in Polarized Societies (Palgrave, 2024, with V. Štětka).

Over her time at Loughborough, Sabina served as Programme Director for both undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in communication and media studies, as Director of Research for Communication and Media, and co-led Loughborough’s submission to the latest national Research Excellence Framework (2021) assessment. She is a member of the Arts and Humanities Research Council Peer Review College and sits on the editorial boards of several international media and cultural analysis journals. 

Sabina also has a track record of collaboration with non-academic stakeholders. Her recent work on the role of media in the rise of illiberalism and on pandemic communication and populism involved collaboration with the European Broadcasting Union, the European Federation of Journalists, and the European Platform of Regulatory Authorities. Her research on Cold War television and everyday life served as a basis for several museum exhibitions in South-eastern Europe, the UK and the US, and a TV documentary for BBC 4. This work provided the basis for one of Loughborough’s top-scoring REF Impact Case Studies, Challenging Cold War Stereotypes. 

Sabina Mihelj’s research examines the interaction between media, politics, and culture, especially in the context of semi-democratic, authoritarian, and post-authoritarian countries. Having made key contributions to debates on media and nationalism and Cold War media and culture, her recent work investigates current threats to democracy, with a particular focus on disinformation and the role of media in the rise of illiberalism and the contemporary ‘culture wars’.  

Recent externally funded research projects:

Sabina Mihelj is responsible for delivering core and optional modules on both undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in media and communication, with a particular focus on media and cultural theory as well as identity and exclusion. 

Main areas of postgraduate research supervision include media and nationalism; communication and identity; media and illiberalism; digital culture; comparative media research; socialist and post-socialist media and culture; media history & memory. 

Current Postgraduate Research Students

  • Liangzuo Hao (2024-) Collective Memory of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Chinese Digital Platforms (with Alena Pfoser)
  • Yiting Chen (2022-) Navigating Multiple Modernities: Media Practices and Identification among Transnational Vietnamese Female Labour in China and Britain (with Elisabeth Mavroudi) 
  • Yunyi Liao (2021-) Everyday Nation Branding (with Michael Skey)
  • Ruoning Chen (2020-) Digital Nationalism in China (with Michael Skey)

Recent Postgraduate Research Students

  • Miao Tian (2024) Performing Class Identities Online: Migrant Workers and Social Media in Contemporary China (with Marco Pino)
  • Jin Dai (2023) Between Official and Personal Memory: Remembering Han Migration to Xinyang (with Alena Pfoser)
  • Natasha Kitcher (2023) Broadcasting before broadcasting: a comparative approach to the history of the electrophone (with Pete Yeandle, Simone Natale, and Gabriele Balbi)
  • Leila Wilmers (2020) Nationalism as an Engaged Ideology: Negotiating Dilemmas of National Continuity in Russia (with Marco Antonsich)
  • Yingzi Wang (2019) Chinese Television between Propaganda and Entertainment, 1992-2017 (with Thoralf Klein)
  • Alena Pfoser (2014) Living at the new margins of Europe: Identity, place and memory in the Russian-Estonian borderland (with Michael Pickering)
  • Ekmel Gecer (2014) Media and Democracy in Turkey: The Kurdish issue (with David Deacon)
  • Dana Nassif (2013) Youth, the New Media and Social Change in Jordan (with Emily Keightley)
  • Yu Wei (Renée) Wang (2013) Who are the Han? Representations of the Han in Late Qing and Early Republican China (with Iris Wigger)
  • Vera Slavtcheva (2011) Children’s Perceptions and Media Representations of the European Union in Bulgaria and the UK
  • Mengmeng Zhang (2010) Representations of Nation and Locality in the Hong Kong Press

Books 

Journal Articles and Book Chapters