Hilde Van den Bulck

Hilde Van den Bulck is a professor of Communication Studies and Head of the Department of Communication at Drexel University in Philadelphia (PA). She holds an MA in Communication Science from KULeuven (B), an MA in Mass Communication from Leicester University (UK) and a PhD in Social Sciences from KULeuven (B). She combines expertise in media culture – focusing in the past ten years on the role of mediated communication in celebrity activism - with expertise in media structure and policies. Her work on media structures and policies focuses on the impact of technological, political, economic and cultural processes, especially how digitization and convergence affect legacy media. She specializes in public (service) media in that regard, most recently analyzing how the use of third party services and algorithmic personalization affect (audience attitudes towards) the core public media value of universality and trust. She has published on these topics in Media, Culture and Society, Convergence and European Journal of Communication, amongst others. Recently, she was principle editor of the Palgrave Handbook of Methods for Media Policy Research. For 12 years, she was vice chair of the Sectorial Media Council that provides policy advice to the Flemish Media Minister.