Kat Albrecht

Kat Albrecht is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology in the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies at Georgia State University. She holds a PhD in Sociology from Northwestern University and a JD from the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law.

Dr. Albrecht’s work sits at the intersection of computational social science and law, where she uses innovative computational techniques to study fear, regulation, and data universe construction. She is particularly interested in the nexus of fear and criminal law. She has also recently begun a significant trajectory of work tracing fear through horror fiction and is presently engaged in research on horror games, low-budget horror, and practical special effects.

Dr. Albrecht frequently serves as a computational science expert for the defense on active legal cases specializing in California Racial Justice Act showings, special circumstance enhancements, and felony murder. She is also a member of the Systematic Content Analysis of Litigation EventS Open Knowledge Network (SCALES OKN) Consortium.

Dr. Albrecht’s work has been published or is forthcoming in outlets like Nature Human Behavior, the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, the Northwestern University Law Review, the UC Irvine Law Review, and Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, among others. She is also a long-time site organizer for the Summer Institutes in Computational Social Science, hosting SICSS Chicago, SICSS Atlanta, and SICSS South Florida.