Dr. Matthias J. Becker was a Postdoc Research Fellow at the Vidal Sassoon Center.

Furthermore, he is affiliated to the Center for Research on Antisemitism (ZfA) at the Technical University in Berlin and to CENTRIC, Sheffield Hallam University.

He read Linguistics, Philosophy and Literature at the Free University of Berlin, and has worked with several research projects on the use of language in political and media campaigns at the Technical University.

His research lies within the disciplines of (pragma)linguistics, research on prejudice, and internet studies and focuses on the construction of implicit hate speech.

His doctoral dissertation, published by Nomos in 2018, analyses the linguistic construction of antisemitic stereotypes and demonising historical analogies in British and German discourses on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. An English version of the book will be published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2020.

In his postdoc project, he examines various forms of antisemitic and racist hate speech in British mainstream media in the context of Brexit, using qualitative, quantitative as well as AI tools for examining a range of websites and social media platforms.