Dr Mariëlle Wijermars (M.W.)

Dr Mariëlle Wijermars is Assistant Professor in Internet Governance. She conducts research on internet freedom and the human rights implications of internet policy and platform governance. Much of her work focuses on how authoritarian states, such as Russia, seek to shape and restrict the circulation of information and the role (inter)national platform companies play in implementing internet censorship.

Since 2025, Mariëlle Wijermars is a member of the Young Academy of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). In recognition of the innovativeness of her interdisciplinary research, Mariëlle Wijermars received the KNAW Early Career Award 2023 and the University Fund Limburg/SWOL Young Talent and Innovation Award 2024. In addition, she was nominated for the Klokhuis Wetenschapsprijs 2024: the annual Science Award of the Dutch public broadcaster’s children’s show Klokhuis.

In 2024-2027, Mariëlle acts as Work Package leader on Russia in the Horizon Europe consortium ARM: Research for information freedom (project number: 101132437). The project explores authoritarian strategies for information control beyond borders, with an emphasis on information suppression. Together with dr Tetyana Lokot (Dublin City University), Mariëlle also runs the Working Group 'The global politics of Internet freedom' at the Center for Advanced Internet Studies (CAIS) (2024). 

In addition to her academic research, Mariëlle regularly contributes to Dutch and international media and is a member of the Expert Pool on Cyber and Expert Pool on Russia of the European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats (Hybrid CoE). For her efforts to provide expert opinion on Russia’s war against Ukraine,  Mariëlle was awarded the FASoS Valorisation Prize 2022.

Mariëlle is the editor of The Palgrave Handbook of Digital Russia Studies (with Daria Gritsenko and Mikhail Kopotev) published by Palgrave Macmillan (2021) and Freedom of Expression in Russia’s New Mediasphere (with Katja Lehtisaari) published by Routledge (2020). She is the author of Memory Politics in Contemporary Russia: Television, Cinema and the State (Routledge 2019).

During the 2022/2023 academic year, Mariëlle was on research leave as a CORE Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies.

Career history

Before joining FASoS in 2019, Mariëlle was a Rubicon postdoctoral fellow at the University of Helsinki. Her NWO-funded project Selling Censorship: Affective Framing and the Legitimation of Internet Control in Russia examined how Internet policy is framed and legitimated in Russian political and media discourses.

In 2020-2022, Mariëlle was also a (non-resident) visiting researcher at the Aleksanteri Institute of the University of Helsinki, where she acted as the Principle Investigator of the project Sustainable Journalism for the Algorithmic Future funded by the Helsingin Sanomat Foundation (2020-2022). The project examined the adoption of digital technologies in Russian news media and the role of Russian 'big tech' (Yandex) in shaping the Russian information space. She was involved in the Nordic workshop series ‘Algorithmic Governance in Context: Towards a Comparative Agenda for Studies of Algorithmic Governance across Politics, Culture, and Economy’, funded by NOS-HS (2019-2020) and resulting in a special issue of New Media & Society, and co-organiser of the Nordic workshop series 'Augmented Journalism: Shaping News Work in the Age of Automated Journalism' (NOS-HS, 2020-2023).

Mariëlle previously worked as a postdoctoral researcher on the project Russian Media Lab: Freedom of Speech and Critical Journalism in Russia (University of Helsinki) and as a lecturer in East European Studies at the University of Amsterdam. She has been a visiting researcher at the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies (IOS Regensburg), the Center for Advanced Internet Studies (CAIS), the Hans Bredow Institute for Media Research, National Research University Higher School of Economics – Moscow and Saint Petersburg, and Russian State University for the Humanities. She holds a PhD (2016) and Master’s degrees in Slavic Languages and Cultures (2012, cum laude) and International Relations and International Organisation (2010) from the University of Groningen.