Robert Hassan is Professor of Media and Communication in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. He has taught, researched, and written for over two decades at the intersection of politics, media, technology, temporality, and the philosophy of science. Since joining the University of Melbourne in 2011, he has played a central role in teaching across BA, MA, and PhD programs, served as Head of Media and Communication from 2014 to 2018, and is currently Director of the Media and Communications MA program.
Professor Hassan has authored twelve books and numerous scholarly essays exploring the political economy of media, digital technology, and the experience of time. His most recent works include Analog (MIT Press, 2022), The Condition of Digitality: A Post-Modern Marxism for the Practice of Digital Life (University of Westminster Press, 2020), Uncontained: Digital Disconnection and the Experience of Time (Grattan Street Press, 2019), and Philosophy of Media (Routledge, 2017). His earlier books include The Age of Distraction: Reading, Writing, and Politics in a High-Speed Networked Economy (2011), Empires of Speed: Time and the Acceleration of Politics and Society (2009), The Information Society: Cyber Dreams and Digital Nightmares (2008), The New Media Theory Reader (2006), Integral Reality (2012), and The Chronoscopic Society (2003). His work has been translated into Chinese, Arabic, and Korean.
From 2010 to 2022, Professor Hassan served as Editor-in-Chief of Time & Society. He has held visiting fellowships at Cardiff University, where he worked with Professor Barbara Adam, and has been a guest lecturer at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the University of Baroda in India. He has also conducted workshops on the politics of time and memory in Srebrenica, Bosnia.
His current research continues to develop the themes of digitality, temporality, and political action through two book projects, Philosophy of Analog and Digital Journalism, which examine the conditions of truth, history, and political agency in post-neoliberal digital societies. As an IAS Fellow, Professor Hassan collaborates on the project Risks to Youth and Studenthood: Commodification, Transitions and Digital Identities, led by Dr Rille Raaper and Dr Mariann Hardey.
