Julia Ebner is a Senior Research Fellow at ISD and an internationally recognised expert on right-wing extremism, online radicalisation and European terrorism prevention initiatives. She completed her PhD in Anthropology at the University of Oxford in spring 2023, where she heads the Violent Extremism Lab.

She is an award-winning and bestselling author of several books. Her first book The Rage: The Vicious Circle of Islamist and Far-Right Extremism won the Bruno Kreisky Award for the 2018 Political Book of the Year. Her second book Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists was an international bestseller and has been translated into seven languages. It won the award ‘Wissenschaftsbuch des Jahres 2020’ (Science Book of the Year 2020), as well as the Dr Caspar Einem prize and was long listed for the Gold Dagger Award. Her latest book Going Mainstream: How Extremists Are Taking Over won the Open Society Prize 2024 of the Central European University. In 2024, Julia Ebner was honoured by the Austrian Foreign Ministry and the renowned daily newspaper “Die Presse” as ‘Austrian of the Year’ in the Success category. For the 21st time, the medium honoured people ‘who have achieved something extraordinary in their field’.

Based on her research, Ebner has acted as an advisor to the United Nations Counter-Terrorism Section. She also advises parliamentary working groups, security agencies and technology companies on the front line and holds workshops at schools and universities. Ebner writes regularly for English and German-language newspapers such as the Guardian, Independent and FALTER, and gives interviews for news formats, documentaries and political talk shows on BBC, CNN, ZDF, ARD, ARTE, ORF and France24.

At ISD, Julia Ebner is co-author of ‘The Online Ecosystem of the German Far-Right’, ‘The Great Replacement: The Violent Consequences of Mainstreamed Extremism’, ‘Mainstreaming Mussolini – How the Extreme Right Attempted to “Make Italy Great Again” in the 2018 Italian Election’, ‘The Fringe Insurgency – Connectivity, Convergence and Mainstreaming of the Extreme Right’ and ‘Hate at the push of a button’. Julia Ebener holds an MSc (Dist) in International History from the London School of Economics and an MSc (Dist) in International Relations from Peking University. She completed her undergraduate studies with a BA (Hons) in Philosophy and a BSc in International Business. In 2023, she completed her PhD in Anthropology at Oxford University.