Mandy Tröger studied North American and West Asian History, and Sociology at the University of Erfurt, Germany. For her Master's degree in American Studies, she went to the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, where she worked as a news editor after her studies. She received her doctorate from the Institute of Communications Research (ICR) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in the United States. Her dissertation analyzes the post-socialist transformation of the East German press; it was awarded the Dissertation Prize for Young Researchers by the Communication History Section of the German Communication Association (DGPuK).
Since her return to Germany, Mandy Tröger has worked at the Institute for Communication and Media Research at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, and at the Institute for Journalism and Communication Research (IJK) at the Hanover University of Music, Drama and Media. Since 2023, she has been working at the University of Tübingen as part of a Walter Benjamin Fellowship from the German Research Foundation (DfG).
Mandy Tröger has been a member of the steering committee of the German Network for Critical Communications Research (KriKoWi) since 2017 and Vice Chair of the Political Economy Section of the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) since 2022. Since 2024, she has also been co-editor of Journalism Research, a journal dedicated to journalism studies. Mandy Tröger also works as a (media) columnist for the Berlin newspaper Berliner Zeitung.
