Sean Everton is a Professor in the Defense Analysis Department and the Co-Director of the CORE (Common Operational Research Environment) Lab at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS). Before joining NPS in 2007, he served as an adjunct professor at Santa Clara and Stanford universities. Professor Everton earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology at Stanford and wrote his doctoral thesis on the causes and consequences of status on venture capital firm performance. He specializes in using social network analysis to track and disrupt dark networks (e.g., criminal and terrorist networks), and he has published in the areas of social network analysis, sociology of religion, diffusion, economic sociology, and political sociology. His first book, Disrupting Dark Networks, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2012, and his second, Understanding Dark Networks (co-authored with Daniel Cunningham and Phil Murphy), was published by Rowman and Littlefield in 2016. His third, Networks and Religion, explores the interplay of networks and religion and was published by Cambridge University Press in 2018. Most recently, he published a Spanish introduction to social network analysis with Christopher Callaghan and General Alvarez Torres (Análisis de Redes Sociales).

PUBLICATIONS

2023. “American Civil Religion in the Era of Donald Trump.” Forthcoming in Religions 14.

2022. Análisis de Redes Sociales. Lima, Peru: Escuela Superior de Guerra del Ejército (with Christopher Callaghan and Augusto Álvarez Torrez).

2022. “A Network Analysis of Twitter’s Crackdown on the QAnon Conversation.” Journal of Social Structure. 23(1): 4-27: https://sciendo.com/article/10.21307/joss-2022-002 (with Daniel Cunningham).

2022. “Historical and Comparative Research on Social Diffusion: Mechanisms, Methods, and Data.” Social Science History 46(2):431-472 (with Steven Pfaff).

2020. “Homegrown Terrorism: A Social Network Analysis of a Minnesota ISIS Cell.” Combatting Terrorism Exchange (CTX) 10(1):36-47 (with Marcelle Burroni).

2018. Networks and Religion: Ties That Bind, Loose, Build-up, and Tear Down. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

2018. “Hiding in Plain Sight.” Nature Human Behaviour 2:115-116. doi: 10.1038/s41562-018-0299-2.

2017. “Social Media Exploitation by Covert Networks: A Case Study of ISIS.” Communications of the Association for Information Systems 1(5):97-120 (with Lee A. Freeman and Robert Schroeder).

2016. “Social Networks and Religious Violence.” Review of Religious Research 58: 191-217.

2016. Understanding Dark Networks: A Strategic Framework for the Use of Social Network Analysis. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield (with Daniel Cunningham and Philip Murphy).

“Brokers and Key Players in the Internationalization of the FARC.” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 36(6):477-502 (with Daniel Cunningham, Greg Wilson, Carlos Padilla, and Doug Zimmerman).

2012. Disrupting Dark Networks. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

PERSONAL WEBSITE