Kees Brants

Prof. Dr. Kees Brants (1946) is director of the MSc-programme in European Communication Studies and senior research fellow at the Amsterdam School of Communications Research, both at the University of Amsterdam. At Leiden University he holds a special chair in political communication. Before studying political science and mass communication at the University of Amsterdam, he studied journalism in Utrecht and worked as a reporter for a local and a national newspaper in the Netherlands. His research focuses on political communication (notably in elections and as infotainment), communication policy (in comparative perspective), media and criminal justice (with his wife Chrisje), and journalism studies. With Chrisje Brants he not only shares an interest in media and crime, but also a (what some call morbid) fascination for the social construction in memory, history and lieux de memoires of the First World War, about which they published two books.