Rate My Professor Frank Harbers

Frank Harbers is an Associate Professor (with ius promovendi) in Media Studies and Journalism within the Faculty of Arts at the University of Groningen. He holds a Research Master's degree in Literary and Cultural Studies (2008) and a Bachelor's degree in Dutch Language and Literature, specializing in Contemporary Literature (2005), both from the University of Groningen. Additionally, he studied for a semester at Freie Universität Berlin during the winter semester of 2006-2007. Harbers completed his PhD at the University of Groningen in 2014, defending his thesis titled "Reporting at the boundaries of the public sphere" on October 30, 2014.

Throughout his career at the University of Groningen, Harbers has held various roles, including Assistant Professor (UD2) from 2014 to 2019 and (UD1) from 2019 to 2024, Postdoctoral Researcher (0.5 FTE) in the VIDI project "Entrepreneurship at Work: Analysing Practice, Labour, and Creativity in Journalism" from 2016 to 2018, and Program Coordinator for the BA Media Studies since 2018 and interim in 2023-2024. Since 2025, he has been Associate Professor (UHD2). He also served as Researcher-in-Residence at the Royal Library in The Hague from July to December 2016.

Harbers' research focuses on journalism history, innovation, and epistemology. His academic interests include journalistic innovation and change, personal journalism as a pluriform epistemic practice, subjectivity and ethos construction in journalism, eyewitnessing and reliability, and the epistemological foundations of journalism, especially concerning narrative journalism and fake news. Notable publications include "Between engagement and ironic ambiguity: Mediating subjectivity in narrative journalism" (2014), "Journalism as practice" (2018), "Time to engage: De Correspondent’s redefinition of journalistic quality" (2020), "The Routledge Companion to Transnational Journalism History" (co-editor, 2026), and recent articles such as "When Journalists Share Their Happy Feelings: Affective Connection as a Source of Reliability in Personal Journalism" (2025). He is a member of the editorial board of Journalism History, the Young Academy Groningen, and the personnel faction of the Faculty Council.