Dr Simon Purdue is the Director of the Domestic Terrorism Threat Monitor at MEMRI in Washington, DC, where he leads a team tasked with tracking and monitoring far-right terror threats in the United States and around the world. He is a trained open-source intelligence researcher, and is an expert on accelerationism, radicalisation, stochastic terrorism and lone actor violence, as well as the role that gender plays in far-right thought and activism.
Simon received his PhD in World History from Northeastern University in 2021, where he focused on the history of race, racism and violence. His dissertation, ‘Intersectional Hate: Gender, Race and Violence on the Transatlantic Extreme-Right, 1969-2009’, explored the way gender has influenced extreme-right activism and violence in the United States and United Kingdom, and how extremist visions of masculinity and femininity were used to recruit and radicalize new members. Simon received his BA in history from University College Dublin in 2015 and his MA, also from UCD, in 2016. As well as being a fellow with the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right, Simon is a fellow with the Institute for Research on Male Supremacy, and has worked with the Prosecution Project, a long-term open-source intelligence project which tracks extremism-related convictions in the United States.
Dr Purdue has presented his research to academic, public, and professional audiences, and in 2019 was on the academic advisory committee of the International Symposium on Radicalization and Extremism which took place in Ankara, Turkey. His public and policy-facing writing has explored radicalization, violence, gender, ‘foreign fighters’, and far-right infiltration of law enforcement, and has been cited by CNN, De Standaard, and the Times of San Diego. His most recently published academic work includes ‘Useful Victims: Symbolic Rage and Racist Violence on the Global Extreme-Right’, which was published in the Journal for Deradicalization in June 2021.
Specialist research areas:
Global White Nationalism; Gender and the Far-Right; Far-Right Paramilitarism
