Gabriele Balbi is Associate Professor in Media Studies at the Institute of Media and Journalism (IMeG), Faculty of Communication, Culture and Society, USI Università della Svizzera italiana (Switzerland).

At this institution, he is also program director of the Bachelor in Communication, director of the China Media Observatory, and vice director of the Institute of Media and Journalism. Furthermore, he is Chair of ECREA Communication History Section.

He received a BA and MA in Communication Sciences at the University of Turin (Italy) in 2002 and 2004 and a PhD in Communication Sciences and Social History of Communication at USI in 2008. He has been lecturer and visiting professor at several universities: Harvard, Maastricht, Columbia, Westminster, Oxford, Northumbria, Perugia, and Augsburg.

Ely Lüthi is PhD Student, Research and Teaching Assistant at the Institute of Media and Journalism (Faculty of Communication, Culture and Society) at USI – Università della Svizzera italiana (Lugano, Switzerland). She is currently also mid-level academic staff representative at USI Senate.

Her PhD research focuses on Swiss digitalisation history and policies, as well as on Swiss political economy of communication, while her research interests also include (digital) media history, media management, radio and TV broadcasting, media policy and policy analysis.

Her last publications include Media and Communication as Swiss Cohesive Forces? (Medien & Zeit, 2021) and «A story of friendship and misunderstandings»: the origins of the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre 1985–1992 (Itinera, 2022, co-written with Paolo Bory and Gabriele Balbi).

Michele Martini is a post-doctoral researcher at the Institute of Media and Journalism, Università della Svizzera italiana (Lugano, Switzerland). His work focuses on the use of new media technologies by religious organisations for proselytisation purposes. To this aim, his studies combine media analysis with interviews and ethnographic observations to understand the interaction between online and offline media structures, especially focusing the construction of transnational communities, spiritual experiences and religious leadership. His research is primarily focused on computational social science and specifically on the development of methods for the analysis of unstructured datasets such as texts, videos, images and user interfaces.