Darian Harff, PhD

Postdoctoral Researcher

Darian Harff is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Communication of the University of Vienna since July 2024. He received is PhD at the Media Psychology Lab at KU Leuven.

His main research interests are political communication and media psychology, with a special focus on social media influencers, their political content and their impact on young people’s political involvement. He published in top-notch journals such as Political Communication, Health Communication, Media Psychology and Digital Journalism. His work has received multiple awards, e.g., from the division for Children, Media and Adolescence of the International Communication Association (ICA) and the German Communication Association (DGPuK). For his PhD, he received a fully-funded and prestigious competitive fellowship of the Belgian research foundation FWO.

His work encompasses theory development on opinion leadership, scale development, and numerous empirical studies including (comparative) content analyses, large-scale surveys, longitudinal research with adolescents and young adults as well as (longitudinal) experiments.