Alexander De Man
Personalia
Alexander De Man is a postdoctoral researcher at the Research Centre for Visual Poetics (University of Antwerp) and the Centre for Cinema and Media Studies (Ghent University). He teaches courses on film, visual cultures, and popular media studies. His research revolves around diasporic and (trans)national cinema, Flemish cinema, film policy, and film festivals. He studies these subjects from the theoretical vantage point of film studies, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and critical media industry studies.
Prior to his doctoral research, he obtained a MA in Communication Sciences at Ghent University, specializing in Film- and Television Studies, and worked as a research assistant at the Cinema Ecosystem (CINECOS) project. In 2020, he obtained a PhD Fellowship of the Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO), under the supervision of Prof. Daniel Biltereyst and Prof. Gertjan Willems. His PhD project, titled Producing Difference, examined the cultural politics of diasporic cinema in the Flemish region (2002-22), focusing specifically on the role of film policy institutions in shaping them. In 2026, he obtained a junior postdoctoral fellowship of the FWO, for a project, titled Curating Diasporic Cinema, that studies how the ecosystem of European film festivals enables, structures, and constrains the emergence and proliferation of diasporic cinema.
His research has been published in several peer-reviewed journals, including the European Journal of Cultural Studies and Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media. He has been a visiting scholar at the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Sciences (LSE) and the Visual and Digital Cultures Research Center at the University of Antwerp. Additionally, he serves as a film programmer at Film-Plateau (Ghent University's film club) and is affiliated with the Centre for the Social Study of Migration and Refugees (CESSMIR).
Research CIMS