Dani Madrid-Morales
Lecturer in Journalism and Global Communication, The University of Sheffield

I'm a scholar of global media and communication with a background in broadcast journalism and East Asian studies currently working as Lecturer in Journalism and Global Communication at the School of Information, Journalism and Communication, The University of Sheffield. Previously, I was an Assistant Professor at the University of Houston and a PhD Fellow at City University of Hong Kong. Before entering academia, I worked for a decade as scriptwriter and news editor at Televisió de Catalunya, and I taught at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF) and Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC).

I study global political communication with an emphasis on State-sponsored news, disinformation and foreign public opinion. My work often crosses over disciplines including media and area studies, international politics, digital humanities and computational social sciences. Geographically, I focus on communication processes in East Asia, where I lived for several years, and Sub-Saharan Africa, which is at the centre of my current research program. I work with qualitative and quantitative methods: from in-depth interviews to online experiments, and from computational text analysis to newsroom ethnography.


Most recent updates:

× 3 Jun, 2025: Dortmund University published a summary of the discussions from the 2024 FoME Symposium entitled "Media Assistance: Mind the Gap! A critical review of common practices and strategies". The report includes a summary of my keynote address.
× 3 Apr, 2025: Attended the "The Encryption Debate: Disinformation and Extreme Speech on WhatsApp, Telegram and Global Messaging Apps" workshop at LMU's Center for Advanced Studies where I presented some preliminary results on electoral disinformation in Namibia and Ghana.
× 1 Apr, 2025: Four papers on disinformation and media literacy that I've co-authored have recently come out in the International Journal of Communication, Mass Communication & Society, African Journalism Studies and the Journal of African Media Studies.
× 27 Mar, 2025: I wrote a short piece for DW Freedom on "Responses to a changing media assistance landscape". This is a summary of my keynote address at last year's FoME Conference in Dortmund.
× 15 Jan, 2025: The China Media Project published an interview with me about China's media engagement with African countries, and how it differs from other coutries' engagement with the continent.
× 3 Dec, 2024: I spoke at the Near East Institute's Global Security Seminar Series about Russian and Chinese strategic disinformation narratives. The recording of my talk is available here.
× 9 Nov, 2024: Had a very productive resarch visit at the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Brazil, where I was invited to deliver two public lectures, one on research methods for disinformation research and one on electoral disinformation in Africa.
× 1 Nov, 2024: Here are the slides of a research talk on China's global media that I gave at the University of Leeds' School of Media and Communication.
× 30 Sep, 2024: I was invited to deliver the keynote lecture at the German Forum of Media Development (FoME) in Dortmund. My talk focused on comparing Chinese and non-Chinese media assistance. The slides of my talk are here.
× 4 Jun, 2024: A new review of my co-edited book (with Herman Wasserman) Disinformation in the Global South has been published in the Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media.
× 27 Mar, 2024: We just released the "Global English-language Corpus of Humanitarian News". The corpus includes data from over 1 million news articles and can be downloaded for free. Here is a description of the project for which data was collected.

Other updates >>