Dana M. Moss is a graduate student in the University of California, Irvine’s Ph.D. program in Sociology and a Podlich Fellow at the Center for the Study of Democracy. Her research interests include social movements, human rights, and repression; stratification and “superfluous” peoples; culture and social change; and the Middle East and North Africa and Arab diasporas.  She is currently researching and writing about state repression against human rights and democratic reform activists in the Kingdom of Jordan, conducting an ethnography on Syrian-American pro-revolution protest and mobilization, and studying transnational Yemeni activism in response to the Arab Spring under the tutelage of her advisor, Distinguished Professor David A. Snow. Dana is working with Dave Snow on a project titled “Protest on the Fly: Resuscitating and Re-Theorizing Spontaneity in the Dynamics of Collective Action and Protest.”  She is also currently working with Professor and Chair David J. Frank on a project examining cross-national changes in the criminal regulation of sex between 1965 and 2005. Dana is the recent recipient of a Pre-Dissertation Fellowship from the American Institute of Yemeni Studies (2012) and the University of California Human Rights Fellowship (2011), among other awards.

Dana worked as the Research Associate for the Department of Sociology at Villanova University from 2006 until 2010; she obtained an interdisciplinary M.A. from Villanova in Liberal Studies with an emphasis on Middle Eastern studies.  In 2009, Dana attended the Yemen College of Middle Eastern Studies in San’a, Yemen, for intensive summer Arabic study, and in 2011, she studied advanced Arabic as a recipient of the Critical Language Scholarship in ‘Amman, Jordan.  She is also a co-founding member and co-director of the Yemen Peace Project, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting awareness about Yemen, cross-cultural dialogue between Yemenis and Americans, and mobilizing for peace in Yemen.

Originally from the Washington, D.C. area, Dana completed her undergraduate degree at Loyola University in Maryland (then Loyola College) in Creative Writing, Sociology and Gender Studies.  She currently resides with her husband and her two dogs in southern California.