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Katharina Esau is a Senior Research Associate at the QUT Digital Media Research Centre, where she heads the News Polarisation research stream in Professor Axel Bruns’s Australian Laureate Fellowship project “Determining the Drivers and Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate”. Katharina holds a PhD in media and communication studies from the University of Dusseldorf, which she published as a book titled “Communication Forms and Dynamic of Deliberation.” In recognition of her work, she received the Best Dissertation Award in 2022 from the Democracy Foundation of the University of Cologne and has been a Research Fellowship at The New Institute in Hamburg (09-12/2023).Her research focuses on digital journalism, political communication, networked digital publics, and democratic innovations. Her teaching portfolio includes introductory units in media and communication studies and digital media analytics: lectures on media systems and industries, advanced courses on theorising and analysing communication and opinion-formation processes online, as well as workshops on digital methods and practical classes on improving the design of digital (news and participation) platforms.