Danie Stockmann

Danie is Director of the Center for Digital Governance and Professor of Digital Governance at the Hertie School. Her current research focuses on the interaction between government, platform firms, and citizens in the area of social media governance. She studies these interactions both in China and in Europe. She holds degrees from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (PhD 2007), the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, and the University of Rochester. Before joining the Hertie School faculty, she was Associate Professor of Political Science at Leiden University. Her book, Media Commercialization and Authoritarian Rule in China (Cambridge University Press, 2013), received the 2015 Goldsmith Book Prize awarded by the Harvard Kennedy School Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy. Her forthcoming book together with Ting Luo Governing Digital China (Cambridge University Press, 2025) explores the logic of popular corporatism, highlighting the bottom-up influences of China's largest platform firms and its citizens. Beyond her academic work, she has served as advisor on Chinese foreign policy and European social media governance to policy-makers in the Netherlands, Germany, and the United States.