# @who: Sociology PhD student
# @where: University of Wisconsin-Madison
# @email: alex dot hanna at gmail dot com
Hi. My name is Alexander Hanna. I'm a PhD student in sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. My advisor is Pamela Oliver.
I'm interested in social movements, social media, and the Middle East. I examine how social movement actors use social media in authoritarian state contexts and processes of mobilization in which the media help facilitate activism. My master's thesis looks into the genesis of the the 6th of April Youth Movement. I am starting to dissect social media's role in the 2011 Egyptian Revolution.
I also work with the Social Media and Democracy group, which is advised by Dhavan Shah. Right now we're working on a project surrounding political communication on Twitter during the 2012 elections.
I'm very involved in the Teaching Assistants' Association, the union representing graduate employees (teaching and project assistants) on the UW-Madison campus.
In my spare time, I read (even more) and go to live music shows. Suffice to say, I'm addicted to coffee. If a mathematician is a machine that turns coffee into theorems (Erdös by way of Rényi), I'm still trying to figure out what social scientists turn coffee into.