Are you passionate about research and teaching, specialized in the digital society or emerging media technologies in the context of marketing (brand) communication or consumer empowerment, and looking for a challenging job in a dynamic setting? We are looking for an Assistant Professor (evaluation for a permanent contract after 18 months).
The Department of Communication Science invites applications for an Assistant Professor in Persuasive Communication focusing on Marketing Communication in the Digital Society, starting no later than 16 January 2023. As an Assistant Professor, you will be a member of the Persuasive Communication Group which is one of the four program groups in the Department of Communication Science at the University of Amsterdam. The Persuasive Communication program group addresses communication that is intended to achieve specific persuasive goals, as is the case in, for instance, marketing and brand communication, health promotion, and public information campaigns.
The
Persuasive Communication research group aims at studying factors that explain the development, reach, processing and effects of professional and consumer-generated messages in marketing- and health communication. We study how people use communication to fulfil their needs in commerce and health, how companies, providers and consumers communicate, and how this influences their attitudes, cognitions and behavior. Our work fits within the
ASCoR Research programme. In the coming years, we aim to further understand the key challenges and opportunities that come with digitalization, AI and related developments such as personalization and fragmentation. Our research focuses on the challenges and opportunities it offers to individuals, including manipulation, human-machine communication, algorithmic persuasion, and the increasing importance of influencers. For this position we therefore search for new colleagues who focus on topics that are central to digitalization like AI, algorithms, chat bots, voice assistants, VR, social media etc. The ideal candidate studies such topics in the context of marketing- and brand communication or consumer empowerment. Affinity or experience with using computational methods in your research is a plus.
Courses we teach in the Master's are the specialization seminars marketing communication and health communication, and electives like brand communication, digital analytics, brands and organizations on social media, persuasion & resistance, and persuasive design. In the Bachelor, we teach the domain module persuasive communication, elective courses about algorithmic persuasion, health communication and content marketing, and graduation projects in which students write their Bachelor thesis. PersCom colleagues are also involved in general communication science courses, and methods courses about experiments, survey, content analysis, or general statistics courses like statistical modelling. More information on these courses can be found
here. Most of our courses are organized in tutorials or seminars of approximately 25 students, and are taught by a team of lecturers.
Within the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences, Communication Science offers a Bachelor's and several Master's degree programmes. With more than 2,400 undergraduate and graduate students,
Communication Science is among the largest departments at the University of Amsterdam with an outstanding international reputation. The College of Communication and the Graduate School of Communication offer a Bachelor and Master program, a European joint degree program in Journalism and a Research Master, the only of its kind in the Netherlands. The teaching in our Communication Science program is interdisciplinary and internationally oriented, offering tracks taught in both English and Dutch. The Amsterdam School of Communication Research
(ASCoR) is the research institute for the Communication Science department, and formulated an ambitious
Research programme. The Department is the home of
the Communication and Digital Society Initiative,
the Digital Communications Methods Lab and it participates in several of the University and Faculty Research Priority Areas.
What are you going to do
As an Assistant Professor (40% research 60% teaching), you:
- teach courses in the programmes of the Bachelor and Master communication science in Dutch and/or English, including substantive theoretical coursework and methodological coursework, depending on educational demand (currently we are looking for someone who is able to teach the more marketing communication related courses in our program);
- organize teaching in the field of Persuasive Communication, from first year's bachelor courses to courses in the master track Persuasive Communication;
- supervise and evaluate Bachelor theses, Master theses and internships;
- conduct research on new media technologies or the digital society in marketing communication, brand communication or consumer empowerment within the ASCoR research program
- take part in outreach and impact activities;
- contribute to and lead applications for external funding;
- participate in committees, groups and projects in the program group Persuasive Communication.