Curriculum Vitae
Silke Adam is Professor of Political Communication and Director of the Institute of Communication and Media Studies at the University of Bern since 2010. She is interested in various facets of political communication – in particular, how political communication is changing in the age of digitalisation. She examines what forces can shape political debates and what form they take. In addition, she explores how identities and political attitudes influence political information behaviour and what effects result from this.
She is currently conducting research within the framework of a project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (Feeling Left-Behind), focusing on people who feel left behind in our societies. She asks to whom these people feel they belong, how this sense of being left behind influences their use of political information, and what effects political information has on them.
Silke Adam studied Communication Science with specialisations in Political Science, Policy Analysis/Consulting and Communication Research at the University of Hohenheim (1995–2001, Diploma) and Boston University (1999, MA). She completed her doctorate on the topic of "Symbolic Networks in Europe. The Influence of the National Level on European Public Spheres. A Comparison of Germany and France" at the University of Hohenheim (2006). She then moved to FU Berlin as a postdoctoral fellow, where she conducted research within the interdisciplinary research group "The Transformative Power of Europe."
Research stays took her to the University of Washington (Seattle, USA), the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Studies (NL), and Bournemouth University (UK). Her work has been recognised with the Robert M. Worcester Prize, the DGPuK Journal Prize, the Research Prize of the University of Hohenheim and the Dr. Alois Mock European Foundation, as well as Best Paper Awards from the International Communication Association.
