Rodolfo has a PhD in Political Sociology from King’s College London (2013). Prior to joining the University of Birmingham, Rodolfo has held academic posts at various British higher education institutions including the University of Warwick (2020-2021), the London School of Economics & Political Science (2017-2021, Birkbeck, University of London (2014-2017), and King’s College London (2011-2014). During this 10-year period, Rodolfo led and taught undergraduate and postgraduate modules in Sociology, Criminology, Economics, Political Philosophy, Media-Communications, and Research Methods.
Rodolfo has also worked on multiple large-scale funded projects that spanned a diverse range of topics and disciplines. From 2020-2021 he assisted the London School of Economics’ ARENA group, as a consultant on cross-national survey studies exploring digital misinformation and news trust in Eastern Europe. Moreover, from 2016-17, he was the lead quantitative researcher for a HORIZONS 2020 project on terrorism and organised crime, and was responsible for creating an international multilingual survey and managing its administration. Prior to this, he worked at Birkbeck University as a post-doctoral research associate on a Leverhulme funded study that examined audiences’ donation and non-generous responses to humanitarian charity media campaigns.
Rodolfo’s primary research has consisted of experimental, survey, and qualitative studies, which have yielded empirical and theoretical insights on 1) the cognitive-affective and social-structural mechanisms that cause individuals to non-consciously acquire and reproduce neoliberal ideology. 2) The minimal effects of social media and digital fake news on elections. And 3), the mechanisms through which prevalent right-wing digital and traditional news outlets generate public hostility towards ethnic outgroups. This research has been published in leading academic journals, as well as reported on by numerous major news outlets from all over the world including, amongst others; the
BBC World Service, US World & News Report, The Times, Newsweek, Forbes, The Huffington Post, France 24, The Independent, La Opinion, and the
Miami Herald.