Assistant Professor in Internet Governance, Maastricht University

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.

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.