Dennis Steffan

Dennis Steffan is an Interim Professor for Communication Science with a Focus on Communication Theory and Media Effects at the Free University of Berlin (until March 2025), affiliated with the Department of Political and Social Sciences and the Institute for Media and Communication Studies. He previously held roles as a Postdoc at TU Dortmund University (2021–2024), Visiting Scholar at Indiana University Bloomington (2022), and Interim Professor at Friedrich Schiller University Jena (2022).

His research centers on political communication, media effects, and multimodal analysis, with emphasis on visual strategies in elections, authenticity in digital politics, and cross-national media framing. Key thematic clusters include:

• Visual rhetoric in political campaigns
• Trust and accuracy in news media
• Gender and self-presentation in digital spaces
• Longitudinal evolution of political messaging

His publications demonstrate a consistent focus on comparative methodologies, analyzing political communication across temporal and national contexts. Recent works explore the global portrayal of leaders like Zelensky, authenticity metrics in voter behavior, and multimodality in candidate framing.

He has contributed to DFG-funded projects on regional press diversity and collaborates with research groups including the Weizenbaum Institute’s 'Digitalisation and the Transnational Public Sphere' and the SFB 'Re-Figuration of Spaces'.