About the authors

Information about our research and our academic homes

Researching and writing this book was truly a joint enterprise. It is without a doubt a better book than either of us would have written on our own. Having first worked together on a project almost three decades ago in graduate school, it has been very rewarding to renew our collaboration in recent years, and now to have this book to show for it.

The spark for the book came from a discussion we had in 2012. Erik had begun analyzing newspaper headlines about Muslims, hoping to learn more about the framing of Muslims as a minority group in a post-9/11 world. Meanwhile, Maurits had been working on applying computational text analysis to study the framing of foreigners in Europe, and was confident that such tools could allow Erik to expand his analysis to full newspaper articles. We quickly realized that the tone of articles was the dominant feature of coverage given its dramatic negativity.

The book that resulted builds on and combines our separate research interests and backgrounds. For more information about those, click on the links below: