Alex Newhouse
Alex Newhouse
PhD Candidate, Political Science · University of Colorado Boulder
I study why social movements embrace violence that undercuts their own political aims, and how online communities turn that violence into identity, propagation, and resilience.
My dissertation introduces participatory violence — a repertoire in which the production of violent action, and of its meaning, is distributed across a large population of contributors who accrue benefits decoupled from movement success. I test the argument with a formal model, comparative case studies, and transformer-based NLP applied to large-scale digital trace data from the online extreme right. 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.
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 that online communities participate in violence after the fact, and the first empirical piece of the dissertation’s account of how celebration feeds future attacks. Presented at APSA 2025; draft available on request.
Research
My work spans three connected areas: the intra-movement dynamics that make disproportionate political violence rational for decentralized movements; 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 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.
- Sep 2025 Presented two papers at APSA 2025.
- Aug 2025 New article in Frontiers in Psychology on extremist identity formation on Steam.