Orsola Torrisi

Social demographer

McGill University 

London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)

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I am an Assistant Professor of Social Demography in the Department of Sociology at McGill University and a full member of McGill's Centre for Population Dynamics. Previously, I was a Postdoctoral Associate in the Social Science Division at New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD).


My research focuses on the demography of crises and violence. I am particularly interested in understanding changes in family dynamics in contexts affected by armed violence and disasters, as well as the impact of crises on sexual and reproductive health outcomes. One other focus I have within this line of research is on the consequences of exposure to armed violence on other forms of violence in private and public settings, including intimate partner violence and obstetric abuse. More recently, I started to work on topics related to measurement, vital registration and the development of new data collection methods to measure demographic outcomes where data are scarce.


My work is interdisciplinary. I combine theoretical approaches from demography, sociology, economics, and development studies with standard demographic, causal and spatial methods. I focus largely on low- and middle-income settings. 

My research has been published in Population and Development Review, World Development, Science Advances, Population Research & Policy Review, Journal of Marriage and Family, European Journal of Population, Genus, Field Methods and Social Science & Medicine. 


I received my Ph.D. in Demography/Population Studies in 2022 from the Department of Social Policy, London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), where I remain an affiliate scholar. I was an Honorary Visiting Researcher at the Center for Demography and Ecology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and I attended the 2018-19 European Doctoral School of Demography (EDSD) at the Max Plank Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) and the University of Southern Denmark (SDU).


I am a member of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (IUSSP), the British Society for Population Studies (BSPS), the Population Association of America (PAA), the Italian Association for Population Studies (AISP), the Population Health in Armed Conflict (PHAC) and the Households in Conflict Networks (HiCN).

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