Ms. José van Dijck – President of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW)
José van Dijck, Distinguished Professor at Utrecht University, has been the President of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) since 18 May 2015. She combines her work as President of the Academy (three days a week) with her research work at Utrecht University.
Ms. Van Dijck (born in 1960) researches social media, media technologies and digital culture. She studied at Utrecht University and gained her PhD at the University of California, San Diego. She was an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Groningen and an associate professor of media and visual culture at Maastricht University. In 2001, Van Dijck became a professor in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam. She chaired the department from 2002 to 2007 and became the Dean of Humanities in 2008, a position she held until 2011. Since 1 January 2017, José van Dijck is Distinguished Professor of Utrecht University.
Ms. Van Dijck played a key role in the founding of CLARIAH, a consortium of humanities research institutes that includes four Academy institutes. Last year, the consortium received twelve million euros from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) to develop a digital infrastructure that will facilitate cross-disciplinary data mining and, eventually, data linking in support of research on major multidisciplinary issues concerning culture and social change. Ms. Van Dijck has been a visiting professor and visiting scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the University of Technology in Sydney, and the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Her book The Culture of Connectivity. A Critical History of Social Media, was published in 2013 by Oxford University Press. Her most recent book, “De Platformsamenleving”, co-authored with Thomas Poell and Martijn Waal, was published by Amsterdam University Press in late 2016. In this book, the authors explore the impact of Airbnb, Uber and other online platforms on various societal domains. Their main question is: how can public values be guaranteed in the platform society?”
Photographer: Josje Deekens