Dr. Matthias J. Becker is a postdoc researcher at the Center for Research on Antisemitism (ZfA) at the Technical University in Berlin. Furthermore, he is affiliated to CENTRIC, Sheffield Hallam University and to the Vidal Sassoon Center at Hebrew University, Jerusalem.
He read Linguistics, Philosophy and Literature at the Free University of Berlin, and has worked with several research projects on the use of language in political and media campaigns at the Technical University.
His research lies within the disciplines of (pragma)linguistics, research on prejudice, and internet studies and focuses on the construction of implicit hate speech.
His doctoral dissertation, published with Nomos in 2018, analyses the linguistic construction of antisemitic stereotypes and demonizing historical analogies in British and German discourses on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. An English version of the book (with the title “Antisemitism in Reader Comments: Analogies for Reckoning with the Past”) will be published with Palgrave Macmillan in 2021.
In his postdoc project, he examines various forms of antisemitic and racist hate speech on British news websites in the context of Brexit.
Since 2020, Dr. Becker leads the international research project “Decoding Antisemitism”, funded by the Alfred Landecker Foundation. In this 3-year pilot project, researchers analyze antisemitism on mainstream news websites and social media platforms in Germany, France, and in the UK based on a mixed-methods approach, also integrating AI technology.