Peter Dahlgren

Peter Dahlgren is a Professor Emeritus of Media and Communication Studies at Lund University, and an honorary doctorate at the University of Lorraine, France, and the University of Bucharest, Romania. An important influence on colleagues and students alike, his work has focused on media and democracy, studied through the lens of late modern social and cultural theory. As such, his impact on the development of media and communication studies at Lund University - and beyond - cannot be overstated.

Professor Dahlgren’s research addressed democratic participation in relation to digital media, exploring factors that promote and prevent civic engagement. His focus carried with it an ethos of friendly and empirically based critical inquiry, evident in both his impressive body of research as well as the media and communication work, and study environment at Lund University.  Specifically, he studied the circumstances of young citizens, the evolution of public intellectuals, the use of media in protest strategies, the changing circumstances of journalism, the significance of cosmopolitanism as an analytic lens for globalized participation, and the subjectivity of civic agency.

More recently, Professor Dahlgren explored civic involvement in the political process and related to that, the significance of the media. The notion of identity is central as it pertains to the emergence of a civic or political self. To this, he added perspectives on the crises of democracy and the changing character of politics, not least regarding the emergence of new forms of political engagement and civic practices.

The research has resulted in approximately 130 articles, several anthologies, and eight single-authored books such as The Political Web (Palgrave, 2013), Media and Political Engagement (Cambridge University Press, 2009), Television and the Public Sphere (Sage, 1995), and most recently, Media Engagement, co-authored with Annette Hill (Routledge, 2022). Dahlgren has also been a member of the Editorial Board of some of the most reputable journals in the field of communication and media such as Critical Studies in Media Communication, Digital Journalism, International Journal of Electronic Governance, Journalism Studies, Javnost/The Public, Media, Culture & Society, Questions de Communication, Reseaux, and The European Journal of Cultural Studies.
 
Active in European academic networks and events, an outstanding keynote speaker, and an engaged teacher, Dahlgren has been a visiting scholar at several universities, including the Université Paris 2, Université de Grenoble 3, the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, and the University of Pennsylvania.