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Zhe Xu

Walter Benjamin Research Associate
Department of Media and Communication, LMU Munich
zhe.xu (at) lmu.de


About Me

I am a Walter Benjamin research associate in the Department of Media and Communication at LMU Munich, where I serve as PI of a German Research Foundation (DFG) project. I am also a research fellow at the Public Tech Media Lab, University of Wisconsin–Madison.

I hold degrees in engineering science and media studies and received my PhD in 2023 from the University of Cologne. While there, I served as an associate lecturer in media studies and received training in natural language processing and machine learning from the Center for Data and Simulation Science and the Department of Digital Humanities. I was also a visiting scholar at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).

I work in political communication, computational social science, and computational journalism, with a substantive focus on information manipulation, platformization, and socially responsible technology. My work has appeared in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly and International Communication Gazette, among other peer-reviewed journals. The DFG, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and LMU Munich have supported my work.

For academic service, I review for journals including Digital Journalism, New Media & Society, Social Science & Medicine, Journalism, and Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, and I serve as a grant and conference reviewer for the Czech Science Foundation (GACR), ECREA, and IAMCR. I was also one of the core planners of the 8th International Conference on World-Class Universities at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

News

Selected Articles

  1. Prioritizing Journalistic Norms or Humanitarian Values? A Multistage Computational Analysis of Journalistic Role Performance in Humanitarian News
    Zhe Xu, Martin Scott, Dani Madrid-Morales, Kate Wright, Shuai Wang
    Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 2026.
    DOI Data Code

  2. How News Media Visually Dehumanize Victims of Humanitarian Crises through Framing Disparities: A Quantitative Comparative Analysis
    Zhe Xu, Mengrong Zhang
    International Communication Gazette, 86(8), 633–654, 2024.
    DOI

  3. The “Ultimate Empathy Machine” as Technocratic Solutionism? Audience Reception of the Distant Refugee Crisis through Virtual Reality
    Zhe Xu, Mengrong Zhang
    The Communication Review, 25(3-4), 181–203, 2022.
    DOI

Working Papers

  1. Modeling the Framing Network of Refugee Issues in International Humanitarian Reporting: A Longitudinal Computational Analysis
    Zhe Xu, Yotam Ophir, Ke Du, Gaia Guatri, Dani Madrid-Morales, Kate Wright, Shuai Wang
    Revise & Resubmit, Journalism Studies.
    Data

  2. Platformizing Refugees: Visual Framing and User Engagement in Humanitarian Organization Communication on Instagram
    Zhe Xu, David Ongenaert, Mengrong Zhang, Canan Cetin, Shuai Wang, Michela Cimarelli, David Luu
    Under review, New Media & Society.

  3. How Does Agenda Flow? More or Less Diverse? Tracing Intermedia Agenda-Setting During Humanitarian Crises
    Zhe Xu, Liane Rothenberger
    Working paper.


© Copyright 2026 Zhe Xu.