LONERS Project Team
Loneliness, Emotions, and Regulation: Understanding Institutions through Privacy
LONERS is an ERC Advanced Grant project at the University of Vienna’s Department of Sociology, examining how loneliness, privacy, and emotions shape public life. Led by Professor Anna Durnova, our interdisciplinary team of postdoctoral and doctoral researchers, just as research assistants and administrative colleagues, aims to map emotions of loneliness and build a framework that helps institutions support citizens while respecting privacy. The team brings expertise from sociology, public policy, socio‑legal studies, psychology and ethnography.
Prof. Anna Durnova
Principal Investigator
Professor of Political Sociology at the Department of Sociology, University of Vienna, and Faculty Fellow at the Yale University Center for Cultural Sociology. She also serves as a member of the editorial boards of the journals Policy & Politics, and Critical Policy Studies.
Previously, she was a researcher at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Vienna (Elise Richter Fellow), as well as at Charles University in Prague, and the University of Lyon. Her research focuses on the role of emotions in democratic societies. She is currently the Consortium Leader of the CIDAPE Project (Climate, Inequality and Democratic Action: The Force of Political Emotions; Horizon Europe 2024-2027) and Principal Investigator of the ERC Advanced Grant LONERS (2026-2031). In 2024 Anna received the Mattei Dogan Foundation Prize for European Political Sociology.
Research interests: political sociology, sociology of emotions, public policy, feminist sociology, interpretive social research.
Linda Coufal
Postdoctoral researcher
Linda Coufal will work as a postdoctoral researcher on the LONERS project from September 2026. Coufal is a radicalization researcher whose work focuses on online extremism, patriarchal masculinity, and loneliness. Their research has been published in journals like New Media & Society and NORMA (International Journal of Masculinity Studies), and they helped pioneer the concept of misogynistic extremism. Methodologically, they specialize in studying written language by combining qualitative and computational research methods. They hold a PhD in Sociology from Charles University.
Michelle Terschi
Predoctoral researcher
Michelle studied Social & Cultural Anthropology and Sociology at the University of Vienna, as well as the Propedeutic Program in Psychotherapy at the Postgraduate Center. From April 2023 to April 2025 she worked as a research assistant in Social Work at Mannheim University of Applied Sciences on a participatory research project, which addressed experiences of sexualized violence in childhood. Since June 2026, she has been a project researcher at LONERS (Loneliness, Emotions, and Regulation: Understanding Institutions through Privacy), where she focuses on the sociology of emotions and political sociology in relation to mental health. In her dissertation, Michelle examines emotions within the institution of psychotherapy that emerge in connection with loneliness and unemployment.
Zita Zeberer
Researcher administrator
Zita holds a BSc degree in International Business Administration and a MSc degree in Sustainable Development. She is responsible for the daily operational, administrative and financial tasks as well as communication and dissemination activities in the ERC Advanced Grant Project LONERS and the Horizon Europe project, CIDAPE (Climate Inequality and Democratic Action: The Force of Political Emotions, 2024 - 2027). She assists the research team and consortium with the preparation of project reporting and deliverables.
Currently, she also administers the ERC funded project DeVOTE at the Department of Government. She has been working on international projects in the field of communication science (OPTED) and environmental sustainability before joining the Department of Sociology at the University of Vienna.
