Core Department Faculty Member
- Thomas Davidson
- Assistant Professor
- PhD. Cornell University, 2020
- Email: thomas.davidson@rutgers.edu
- Office: Davison Hall
- Personal Website
- Twitter: @thomasrdavidson
- Curriculum Vitae
Thomas Davidson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Rutgers University. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology from Cornell University in 2020. His research interests include political sociology, social movements, and the sociology of culture. His research uses digital trace data from social media and other websites combined with statistical analysis and computational methods, including natural language processing and machine learning.
He is currently working on several projects on populism, far-right politics, and social media. He is also working on research understanding the evolution of hate speech moderation policies on social media platforms and developing experimental research to understand how perceptions of hate speech vary according to social contexts.
He teaches classes including Political Sociology, Sociology of Culture, Statistics Methods in Sociology, and Computational Sociology.
- In the Public Eye:
- Published op-eds in The Washington Post's Monkey Cage blog on the relationship between social media activity and far-right support in Germany and Italy.
- Interviewed by The New Scientist, Vox, and Business Insider about his research on automated hate speech detection.
- Faculty Article(s):
- Black Box Models and Sociological Explanations: Predicting High School GPA Using Neural Networks
- Britain First and the UK Independence Party: Social Media and Movement-Party Dynamics
- Black Box Models and Sociological Explanations: Predicting High School GPA Using Neural Networks
- Program Areas:
- Culture and Cognition
- Organizations, Networks, and Work
- Politics and Social Movements
