About

Biography and contact

Biography

Alex Newhouse is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of Colorado Boulder, specializing in the computational analysis of political violence and online extremism. His dissertation introduces participatory violence to explain why social movements embrace violence that undercuts their own aims, combining formal theory, comparative case studies, and transformer-based NLP applied to large-scale digital trace data from the online extreme right. His subfields are comparative politics and political methodology.

He is a Humane Studies Fellow at the Institute for Humane Studies, a Research Fellow with the National Humanities Alliance Humanities Workforce Program, and a Senior Non-Resident Fellow at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. He previously served as Deputy Director of the Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism (CTEC) and as an investigative consultant to the U.S. House Select Committee on January 6th.

His work has appeared in Frontiers in Psychology, CTC Sentinel, and a series of book chapters on gaming and extremism, and has been covered by the Washington Post, the New York Times, NPR, the BBC, Politico, Wired, and Meet the Press. He has been Principal Investigator on $1.38M in externally funded grants.

Alex graduated summa cum laude from Middlebury College and holds master’s degrees from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies (Nonproliferation and Terrorism Studies) and the Georgia Institute of Technology (Analytics).

A short bio suitable for programs and introductions is the first paragraph above.

Currently

  • Dissertation. Revising the prospectus around participatory violence and drafting the chapter on its logic and formal model.
  • Humanities workforce. Leading a computational analysis of U.S. humanities career trajectories at the National Humanities Alliance.
  • AI and politics. Studying polarization and political behavior in large language models through a Humane Studies Fellowship.

Contact

  • Email: alex.newhouse@colorado.edu
  • Office: Department of Political Science, University of Colorado Boulder, Ketchum 106
  • Mail: 333 UCB, Boulder, CO 80309

I reply to email within a few business days. For media inquiries, please include the outlet, deadline, and topic in your first message.

Elsewhere

Materials

Last updated: September 2026

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