I study how online communities turn into offline political violence — using transformer-based NLP, social network analysis, and time-series causal inference. I’m a PhD candidate in Political Science at CU Boulder, a Humane Studies Fellow, and a Research Fellow at the National Humanities Alliance. I previously served as Deputy Director of the Center on Terrorism, Extremism & Counterterrorism and as an investigative consultant to the U.S. House Select Committee on January 6th.
Job Market Paper
“‘The Happening Is Coming’: Apocalyptic Rhetoric on 4chan Following Mass Casualty Attacks” — presented at APSA 2025. A transformer classifier + intervention analysis showing that online apocalypticism spikes in the immediate aftermath of mass-casualty terrorist attacks — evidence of feedback loops between digital communities and offline violence. PDF available on request.
What I work on
Research
Online radicalization, neo-fascist networks, AI safety, and gaming as a site of political socialization.
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Tools & Code
Open-source NLP classifiers, datasets, and reproducible pipelines for studying extremist text at scale.
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Teaching
Quantitative methods, computational social science, and original R tutorials used at CU Boulder.
See teaching →
Selected work
- Newhouse, A. & Kowert, R. (2025). Extremist Identity Creation Through Performative Infighting on Steam. Frontiers in Psychology.
- Kowert, R., Kilmer, E., & Newhouse, A. (2024). Taking it to the Extreme: Prevalence and Nature of Extremist Sentiment in Games. Frontiers in Psychology.
- Newhouse, A. (2021). The Threat is the Network: The Multi-Node Structure of Neo-Fascist Accelerationism. CTC Sentinel.
- McGuffie, K. & Newhouse, A. (2020). The Radicalization Risks of GPT-3 and Advanced Neural Language Models. arXiv.
Impact
$1.38M Funding as PI
52 Students mentored
276K Article reads
3 Courses as instructor
Featured in
Washington Post New York Times NPR BBC Politico Wired Bloomberg Meet the Press Vice Axios FiveThirtyEight ProPublica
Recent
- 2026-04-14 Successfully defended dissertation prospectus.
- 2025-10-01 Awarded a Humane Studies Fellowship to study polarization in LLMs.
- 2025-10-01 Began Research Fellowship with the National Humanities Alliance Humanities Workforce Program.
- 2025-09-01 Presented job-market paper at APSA 2025.
- 2025-08-01 New article in Frontiers in Psychology on extremist identity formation on Steam.