Chair of Political Communication with a Focus on Eastern Europe and the Post-Soviet Region

We offer courses in the fields of political communication, international communication as well as traditional social science and AI-enabled computational methods.

Our teaching is mainly aimed at students of the B.A. Journalism and Strategic Communication (JoKo) and the M.A. Communication in Digital Societies (KoDi). We also open thematically relevant courses to students focussing on cultural studies of Eastern Europe and the post-Soviet region.

We are currently working on three research projects: (1) the Authoritarian AI project investigates how authoritarian states – in particular Russia – regulate and utilise large language models for propaganda purposes (funded by bidt); (2) the ‘Central Asia as Cinematic Territory’ project examines cinematic content in the Central Asian republics (funded by DFG); (3) the POLINOCULATE project investigates strategies for combating disinformation (funded by EU Horizon Europe).

Professor Florian Toepfl holds the Chair of Political Communication with a Focus on Eastern Europe and the Post-Soviet Region. Prior to joining the University of Passau in 2019, he was an Emmy Noether junior research group leader at the Freie Universität Berlin (2014-2019) and a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science (2012 to 2014). Toepfl was Principal Investigator of an ERC Consolidator Project on "The Consequences of the Internet for Russia's Informational Influence Abroad" (RUSINFORM, 2019-2025).