Natalia Chaban

Natalia Chaban (born 1971) is a Ukrainian–New Zealand media and communications academic, and is a full professor at the University of Canterbury, specialising in political and media discourse. She is the Director of Canterbury's Public Diplomacy and Political Communication Forum, and has twice been awarded a Jean Monnet Chair.

Academic career
Chaban completed a Bachelor of Arts in Germanic languages and literature at Cherkasy State Technological University in Ukraine, followed by a Master of Arts degree in media studies and higher education administration at New York University. She then completed a PhD in linguistics at the Kyiv National Linguistic University. Chaban held research and teaching positions at Cherkasy State University, Lund University, and at the University of Maryland at College Park. In 2002 Chaban joined the faculty of the Department of Media and Communication at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, rising to full professor. She is the Director of the Public Diplomacy and Political Communication Forum at Canterbury.

Chaban was a visiting research fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of Bologna in Italy in 2022, and at Vytautas Magnus University, Lithuania. Chaban has twice been awarded a Jean Monnet Chair, an Erasmus programme designed to deepen access to European Union studies throughout universities. Chaban is interested in political and public communication, and leads research on public diplomacy in the EU, academic knowledge production relating to the war in Ukraine, and communication pedagogy.

Chaban is President of the Ukrainian Studies Association of Australia and New Zealand. Chaban was a founding co-editor of the Australian and New Zealand Journal of European Studies.