Personal profile

Research interests

Toni Rouhana is a postdoctoral research associate at the Centre for the Comparative Study of Civil War at the University of York where he conducts a comparative study of the role that sect identities play before, during, and after the wars that took place in Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon. He holds a PhD in Sociology with a designated emphasis in History of Consciousness at the University of California Santa Cruz. He studies war, social movements, religious sectarianism, political emotion and affect online and offline. He also holds a MS in Computer Engineering and a MA in Sociology. He has built an online data collection around the Syrian civil war with more than five hundred million tweets and hundreds of thousands of Facebook posts and news articles’ comments, which he uses in conjunction with the eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork he conducted in war torn Syria and Lebanon. His interdisciplinary research engages three areas that are typically treated separately: traditional ethnographic methods, theories of political identities and social movements, and ethnographically-informed computational social science analysis of daily interactions.

Education/Academic qualification

PhD, University of California, Santa Cruz

Masters, University of California, Santa Cruz