Orsola Torrisi

Hello - Thank you for visiting my website!

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.