Alex Newhouse

PhD Candidate, Political Science · University of Colorado Boulder

I study how online communities produce offline political violence, using transformer-based NLP, social network analysis, and time-series causal inference.

My dissertation asks where the mobilizing capacity of the online extreme right comes from, given that the movement is geographically dispersed, organizationally fragmented, and leaderless. My subfields are comparative politics and political methodology.

Before starting the PhD I was Deputy Director of the Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism, and an investigative consultant to the U.S. House Select Committee on January 6th. I am currently a Humane Studies Fellow, a Research Fellow with the National Humanities Alliance Humanities Workforce Program, and a Senior Non-Resident Fellow at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies.

CV (PDF) · CV (web) · Google Scholar · ORCID · GitHub · alex.newhouse@colorado.edu

On the academic job market in AY 2027–28; available to start Fall 2028. Job-market materials.

Job market paper

“The Happening Is Coming”: Apocalyptic Rhetoric on 4chan Following Mass-Casualty Attacks

A transformer classifier and intervention analysis applied to eleven years of 4chan /pol/ posts. Apocalyptic rhetoric rises sharply in the days after mass-casualty terrorist attacks, evidence of a feedback loop between online communities and offline violence. Presented at APSA 2025; draft available on request.

Dissertation overview · Request the paper

Research

My work spans three connected areas: the social processes that let decentralized online movements mobilize; gaming platforms as sites of political socialization and recruitment; and the political risks of generative AI systems. Methodologically, I build transformer-based measures of political text, model diffusion across networks, and use interrupted time-series and intervention analysis to identify online–offline effects.

All publications and projects · Dissertation · Code and data

Selected publications

Newhouse, A. and Kowert, R. (2025). “Extremist Identity Creation Through Performative Infighting on Steam.” Frontiers in Psychology.

Kowert, R., Kilmer, E., and Newhouse, A. (2024). “Taking it to the Extreme: Prevalence and Nature of Extremist Sentiment in Games.” Frontiers in Psychology, 15:1410620.

Newhouse, A. (2021). “The Threat is the Network: The Multi-Node Structure of Neo-Fascist Accelerationism.” CTC Sentinel, 14(5).

McGuffie, K. and Newhouse, A. (2020). “The Radicalization Risks of GPT-3 and Advanced Neural Language Models.” arXiv preprint 2009.06807.

Teaching

I teach quantitative methods, computational social science, and political violence. I have been instructor of record for three self-designed courses at Middlebury College and MIIS, and a teaching assistant across the CU Boulder political science curriculum. I also write open R tutorials for methods students with no prior coding background.

Teaching and mentorship · Teaching statement · Sample syllabus

Recent

Apr 2026 Defended the dissertation prospectus.
Oct 2025 Awarded a Humane Studies Fellowship to study polarization in large language models.
Oct 2025 Began a Research Fellowship with the National Humanities Alliance Humanities Workforce Program.
Sep 2025 Presented the job-market paper at APSA 2025.
Aug 2025 New article in Frontiers in Psychology on extremist identity formation on Steam.