Jelle Mast

Jelle Mast holds a PhD in Communication Studies (University of Antwerp, 2011) and currently works as an Assistant Professor of Journalism Studies at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) where he teaches and supervises master theses in journalism and documentary studies. He used to be director of the Brussels Institute for Journalism Studies at VUB (2013-2023) and is a past secretary, vice-chair and chair of the Visual Communication Studies Division of the International Communication Association (2010-2012, 2018-2021), the premier organization in the discipline. Recently, he joined the editorial board of the Visual Communication section of the Open Access journal Frontiers in Communication as a founding Associate Editor.  

In his doctoral research, he approached the popular phenomenon of 'Reality TV' through the lens of documentary theory, looking into questions of genre hybridization, documentary values and ethics. Along the same lines, his main research interests typically intersect aspects of journalism practice, visual communication, genre and/or professional ethics, with current work focusing on meta-journalistic discourse and normative conceptions of journalism. He has published as an author, co-author or editor in various peer-reviewed journals in the fields of journalism studies and media and cultural studies, and presented his work, amongst others, at the (bi-)annual conferences of the International Communication Association (ICA), the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA), the Association for the Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC), the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS), Visible Evidence, and the International Visual Sociology Association (IVSA). In 2015, he stayed at the School of Journalism of the University of Arizona in Tucson, US, as a visiting (research) scholar in the US Department of State’s Exchange Visitor Program.