Assistant Professor
Peterson Hall Building, Room 340
3460 McTavish
Montreal, Quebec, H3A 0E6
E-mail: orsola.torrisi [at] mcgill.ca
Office: Room 340, Peterson Hall Building
SOCI 350 Student hours: Thursdays 4:30-5:30 PM. Schedule appointment at
SOCI 545 Student hours: Fridays 4:45-5:45 PM. Schedule appointment at
Research Areas
Demography, Family Dynamics, Armed violence, Crises, Vital Registration Systems, Low- and Middle-Income Countries
Biography
(PhD in Demography/Population Studies from the London School of Economics, 2022).
Orsola Torrisi is a social demographer whose research focuses primarily on the demography of crises and violence. She is 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 within this line of research is on examining the consequences of exposure to armed violence on other forms of violence both in private and public settings, including intimate partner violence and obstetric abuse.
Torrisi鈥檚 second research line focuses on topics related to weak vital registration systems, including their causes and consequences, and the development of methods of (mortality) data collection where data is scarce, including in populations affected by armed violence.
With her research, she aims (i) to expand knowledge on how crises and uncertainty due to violence and disasters affect demographic processes and (ii) to advance demographic data collection efforts to ensure that good quality research can be conducted in unstable settings.
Her work is interdisciplinary, combining theoretical approaches from demography, sociology, economics, and development studies with standard demographic, causal and spatial methods. Torrisi鈥檚 research focus is largely on low- and middle-income settings.
She received her PhD in Demography/Population Studies from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in December 2022. Her thesis was awarded the LSE Titmuss Prize for best PhD Thesis in Social Policy by the LSE and the Valeria Solesin Prize for best PhD Thesis in Demography by the Italian Statistical Society (SIS). Before joining 平特五不中, she was a Postdoctoral Associate at New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) and a Honorary Visiting Researcher at the (CDE) at the University of Wisconsin鈥揗adison. Torrisi also attended the European Doctoral School of Demography (EDSD) as an Associate of the (MPIDR) and the University of Southern Denmark (SDU).
Selected Publications
Torrisi, O., Svallfors, S. and Gargiulo, M. (2024). Obstetric violence in the context of community violence: the case of Mexico. Social Science & Medicine, 117348.听
Torrisi, O. (2024) Violent instability and modern contraception: Evidence from Mali. World Development. doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2024.106538
Torrisi, O. and Sieverding, M. (2024). Union formation characteristics, marital quality and displacement: the case of young adults in Jordan. Genus.
Aburto, J.M., Riffe T., Di Lego V., van Raalte A. Kashyap, R. and Torrisi, O. (2023). The global contribution of violence to lifetime uncertainty. Science Advances, 9(5), eadd9038.
Torrisi, O. and Karlinsky, A. (2023). The casualties of war: An excess mortality estimate of lives lost in the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. Population Research and Policy Review, 42(3), 41.
Torrisi, O. (2022). Wedding amidst war? Armed conflict and female teen marriage in Azerbaijan. European Journal of Population, 38(5), 1243-1275
Torrisi, O. (2022). Young鈥恆ge exposure to armed conflict and women's experiences of intimate partner violence. Journal of Marriage and Family, 85(1), 7-32
Torrisi, O. (2020). Armed conflict and the timing of childbearing in Azerbaijan. Population and Development Review, 46(3), 501鈥�556.
Torrisi, O., Leone T. and Le Voir, R. (2024). 鈥淔amily planning in violent conflict: what do we (don鈥檛) know?鈥�. In Handbook on Conflict and Health. Edited by Hagopian, A. and Birch, M. DeGruyter, Forthcoming.
Cetorelli, V., Ashraph, S., and Torrisi, O. (2023). A demographic documentation of ISIS鈥檚 attack on the Yazidi village of Tel Qasab and Tel Banat and Rambousi. LSE Middle East Centre, London: LSE Middle East Centre Report.
Research grants
2025-2027 鈥淓thical and Responsible Social Science Research on Contexts of Armed Conflict鈥� (USD 400,000), Ethical and Responsible Research (ER2), National Science Foundation (NSF) with Prof. Nathalie Williams, Prof. Amy Hagopian, Prof. Cynthia Buckley and Dr Emma Mateo.
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