Alfred Moore is a research fellow at CRASSH at Cambridge University, where he works on the Leverhulme funded project Conspiracy and Democracy (RP2012-CO17). He writes on political theory, democracy, and the politics of expertise. He has taught philosophy at University College Cork, was a Marie Curie Research Fellow at the University of British Columbia, and was a […]

André Krouwel teaches comparative political science and communication science at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and is the founder of Kieskompas (Election Compass) – a developer of online Vote Advice Applications, with which data on party positions and voter opinions is collected. Krouwel’s research focuses on public opinion and politically relevant sentiments, voting behavior, political parties, and […]

Dr. Andreas Önnerfors is an associate professor in the history of sciences and ideas at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. His main research areas are the cultural history of eighteenth-century Europe with a focus on Swedish-German relations, press history, and organized sociability, in particular, secret societies and freemasonry. He also works on the rhetoric of […]

Annika Rabo is a professor of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University. 
She received her Ph.D. in Social Anthropology in 1986 after completing a thesis on the political and social effects of a gigantic irrigation scheme along the Euphrates in northeast Syria. Since the late 1970s, she has conducted fieldwork in various parts of the Middle East, […]

Asbjørn Dyrendal is a professor in the history of religion at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). His research is about contemporary religion, its different expressions and conditions, with a sideways glance at questions of relevant theory or method. The religious expressions cover the spectrum from “fundamentalism” and “New Age,” to Satanism and […]

Barbara De Poli teaches contemporary history of Islamic countries and political thought of Islamic countries at Ca’ Foscari University, Venice. She is the scientific coordinator of the Center for Contemporary Middle East Studies (CEM) at the same university, and board member of the Centre for Human Rights Studies (CESTUDIR). Her main field of research are […]

Ben Carver teaches literature and cultural theory at Aarhus University. Broadly defined, his research area is the cultural history of speculative fiction in the 19th and 20th centuries. He has written a monograph for Palgrave Macmillan, Alternate Histories and Nineteenth-Century Literature: Untimely Meditations in Britain, France, and America, of which Fredric Jameson writes: “The counterfactual […]

Dov Winer is a psychologist (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) who specialized in Online Education and Training (University of London). His professional activities focus on the application of ICT in education and cultural heritage. He founded the Israel Internet Society and participates in the Steering Committee of the EUN Association of European Ministries of Education for […]

Clare Birchall is a Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Culture at King’s College London. She is the author of Knowledge Goes Pop: From Conspiracy Theory to Gossip (Berg, 2006) and co-editor of New Cultural Studies: Adventures in Theory (Edinburgh University Press, 2007). She has also edited special issues of the journals Theory, Culture and Society and […]

Dana Crăciun teaches 20th-century literature and American Studies at the West University of Timișoara. Her other research interests include post-9/11 crises of representation, critical theory, and, more recently, conspiracy theories.

Daniel Cohnitz (born in 1974) holds the chair for theoretical philosophy at Utrecht University. In his research on conspiracy theories, he focusses on the social epistemology of conspiracy theories, e.g. the effect that belief in conspiracy theories has on epistemic trust relations. Cohnitz defended his dissertation on Thought Experiments in Philosophy (Gedankenexperimente in der Philosophie) […]

David Harper is Reader in Clinical Psychology at the University of East London where he is also Programme Director (Academic) of the Professional Doctorate in Clinical Psychology. He has a longstanding interest in unusual experiences and beliefs in both clinical and non-clinical populations with a focus on the social context of paranoia and conspiratorial belief. […]

Eduardo Camilo is a professor of semiotics, advertising, and strategic communication at the Department of Communication and Arts, University of Beira Interior, Portugal. He graduated in Communication Studies from the University Nova de Lisboa and holds a Ph.D. and Habilitation in Communication Studies from University da Beira Interior. He was a visiting Professor at the University […]

Estrella Gualda is a professor of Sociology at the Universidad de Huelva, Spain, where she is the director of the Social Studies and Social Intervention Research Centre. Throughout her career, Professor Gualda has published several books, book chapters, and scientific articles in the fields of sociology, social exclusion, migrations and minorities, cross-border issues, social networks, social capital, and social media. She is currently working on the study […]

Eva Horn is a Professor of Modern German Literature and Cultural Studies at the Department of German, University of Vienna, Austria. One of her major fields of research is the notion of political secrecy and the modes of its representation in fiction. She has published about the theory and practice of state secrecy in the […]

Eva Kimminich is professor of Cultural Studies and Cultural Semiotics at the University of Potsdam, where she holds the Chair of Romance Cultures. She is responsible for the master programs Applied Cultural Studies and Cultural Semiotics and International Applied Cultural Studies and Semiotics. Her main research interests encompass cultural and pop-cultural aspects, particularly youth and […]

Filippos Tymvios graduated from the Physics Department of the National And Kapodistrian University of Athens in 1994. He received his M.Sc. in Environmental Physics in 1998 and his Ph.D. in Solar Radiation Modeling in 2007 from the same university. He also holds an M.Sc. in Public Sector Management from CIIM (2012). He is a certified […]

Gintaras Aleknonis is a professor at and the director of the Institute of Communication at Mykolas Romeris University, Vilnius, Lithuania. His research interests include media and democrac, as well as the relationship between the media and the state. These topics are discussed in his book The New Censorship (2011, in Lithuanian). He is the author […]

Grigorij Mesežnikov, president of the Institute for Public Affairs (IVO), Bratislava, Slovakia, is a graduate of the Faculty of Arts at Moscow State University (MGU). Between 1983 and 1993, he worked at Comenius University in Bratislava, from 1993 to 1997, he served at the Political Science Institute at the Slovak Academy of Sciences. He is a […]

Helena Pires is an Assistant Professor in the Communication Sciences Department as well as an integrated Member of the Communication and Society Research Centre at the University of Minho. She completed her Ph.D. in Semiotics of Communication at the University of Minho in 2007. Her research interests lie in urban communication, visual semiotics, advertising, landscape, […]

Henry M. Taylor is Privatdozent (P.D., Private Lecturer) in Film and Media Studies at the University of Konstanz and has recently published his second book, Conspiracy! Theorie und Geschichte des Paranoiafilms (Schüren, 2018) on conspiracy and paranoia in film and television. He previously obtained his Bachelor’s degree in Film and History at the University of […]

Hulda Thórisdóttir is an Associate Professor in the Psychology and Political Science Departments at the University of Iceland. She has a Ph.D. in Social Psychology from New York University (2007). Her research centers on political ideology, its structure, causes, and consequences. In her doctoral research, initiated in the months after the 9/11 attacks, she used […]

Isabel Marcos is a Senior Research fellow of CICS.NOVA – Interdisciplinary Centre of Social Sciences, FCSH at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa. She received a Ph.D. in Semiotics (1996) from the University of Aarhus (Denmark) and a Ph.D. in Communication Sciences (2000) from the New University of Lisbon (Portugal). Her major publications are: Espace, sémiotique et […]

Ivelina Ivanova is a senior research fellow at the Institute for Studies in Societies and Knowledge, Bulgarian Academy of Science. She has published two books and a number of papers on theory of history, philosophy of history, conceptual history, the legitimiation of historical knowledge, and its social and political uses. Ivelina Ivanova has been a […]

Dr. Jan-Willem van Prooijen is an Associate Professor at VU Amsterdam and a Senior Researcher at the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement (NSCR). His core discipline is social psychology, and he studies people’s subjective beliefs in conspiracy theories through quantitative research methods. His research focuses on the cognitive, group dynamic, […]

Jasna Milošević Đorđević teaches Social Psychology at the Faculty of Media and Communication (Singidunum University), Belgrade, Serbia and the University of Montenegro (Podgorica). She is also a Research Associate at the Institute for Political Studies and research consultant in Ipsos Strategic Marketing. Her M.A. and Ph.D. thesis were related to voting behavior and national identity. She […]

José Rúas-Araújo is a specialist in mass media and associate professor at the Social Sciences and Communication School of the Universidad de Vigo, Spain. He has an experience of more than ten years as a journalist and fifteen as a professor. He holds a PhD in Communication from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain. His […]

Juha Räikkä is a professor of practical philosophy at the University of Turku, Finland. His research interests include topics such as justice, privacy, forgiveness, remorse, self-deception, just war-theory, equality, burden of proof, and conspiracy theories. Räikkä’s recent publications include two books: Social Justice in Practice (Heidelberg: Springer 2014) and Human Imperfection (in Finnish, 2017). He […]

Juho Ritola is a docent in Argumentation Theory. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Turku in 2004 and has worked at universities in Finland, Estonia, and the Netherlands. His main interest lies in the philosophical, especially epistemological, questions of argument and inference. He has published on fallacies, the notion of critical thinking, and […]

Karen Douglas is a Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Kent. She studies the psychological factors associated with belief in conspiracy theories and some of the social, political, health, and environmental consequences of belief in conspiracy theories.

Kateřina Králová is an Assistant Professor in Contemporary History and former Vice-Dean for International Relations (2010–2015) at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University, Prague. In her research, she focuses on reconciliation with the Nazi past, post-conflict societies, memory, and oral history regarding the Holocaust, Greek Civil War, and post-war reconstruction particularly in Greece. In 2016, […]

Levente (Levi) Littvay is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the Central European University, Budapest, Hungary, where he teaches M.A. and Ph.D. courses in applied statistics with a topical emphasis on electoral politics, voting behavior, political psychology, and American politics. Furthermore, he is the recipient of CEU’s Distinguished Teaching Award. He received his M.A. […]

Lindsay Porter is an author and editor specialising in the print and visual culture of the 18th and 19th centuries, with a particular interest in popular perceptions of authority and elitism. Her research interests focus on the relationship between popular beliefs – including rumour, myth, folklore, and collective memory – and political action. Books include […]

Mar Gallego Durán has taught American and African American Literatures at the University of Huelva, Spain, since 1996. She obtained her Ph.D. degree in 1997 and was awarded fellowships at the Universities of Cornell, Northwestern, and Harvard. She is currently director of the Research Centre on Migrations at the University of Huelva. Her major research […]

Marios Hatzopoulos is a researcher at the Research Centre for Modern History (KENI) at the Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Athens, Greece. As a former student of Anthony D. Smith and as a historian, he specializes on nationalism and national identities in SE Europe. He is interested in Modern Greek and Ottoman history, […]

Massimo Leone is a Professor of Semiotics, Cultural Semiotics, and Visual Semiotics at the Department of Philosophy, University of Turin, Italy. He graduated in Communication Studies from the University of Siena, and holds a D.E.A. in History and Semiotics of Texts and Documents from Paris VII, an M.Phil. in Word and Image Studies from Trinity […]

Maurus Reinkowski is a Professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at the Department of Social Sciences, University of Basel, Switzerland. His field of specialization is the history of the late Ottoman Empire and the modern Middle East. Amongst other subjects, he has published on the early beginnings of the Israel-Palestine conflict, nationalism, and minorities […]

Dr. Mitja Velikonja is a professor for cultural studies and head of the Center for Cultural and Religious Studies at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. Main areas of his research include central-European and Balkan political ideologies, subcultures and graffiti culture, collective memory, and post-socialist nostalgia. His last monograph in English is Rock’n’Retro – New Yugoslavism […]

Nahuel Ribke is a communication and cultural studies scholar at the Tel Aviv University and Seminar Hakibutzim College. He is committed to studying the relationships among media industries, political institutions, and cultural practices. His doctoral thesis examines the emergence and expansion of Globo Television Network during the military regime in Brazil (1964–1985) through the complex […]

Nico Pytlik is currently a PhD candidate in clinical psychology. He holds a master’s degree in psychology from the Philipps-University Marburg. Previously, his research focused on uncovering the mechanisms underlying conspiracy theory, particularly cognitive bias and information processing. Presently, he is setting his sights on understanding the genesis of schizophrenia in order to elucidate potential […]

Nicola Gess is a professor of German Literature at Universität Basel. She received her Ph.D. from Princeton University and Humboldt Universität zu Berlin in 2004 and her Habilitation from Freie Universität Berlin in 2012. She is the author of two monographs: Gewalt der Musik: Literatur und Musikkritik um 1800 (2011 in 2nd edition), Primitives Denken: […]

Nicolas Guilhot is a research professor at the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique). His work sits at the intersection political theory, the history of political thought, and international relations. His most recent publications include After the Enlightenment: Political Realism and International Relations in the mid-20th Century (Cambridge UP, 2017), The Invention of International […]

Nils Bubandt is a Professor of Anthropology at Aarhus University and co-editor-in-chief of the journal Ethnos. He is the author of Democracy, Corruption and the Politics of Spirits in Contemporary Indonesia (Routledge, 2014) which analyzes politics and corruption discourses in Indonesia in light of widespread beliefs in (as well as disbelief about) the reality of […]

Olivier Klein is a Professor of Social Psychology at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium. His research interests include collective memory, gender, social stereotypes, and intergroup relations. His work on conspiracy theories relates mainly to the cognitive factors involved in belief and disbelief in information conveyed by the media.

Onoriu Colăcel is a Lecturer in English at Ștefan cel Mare University of Suceava, Romania. His main research interests are concerned with cultural memory and patterns of self-identification in literature, media, and popular culture.

Dr. Habel’s work is in the area of political communication and public opinion. In 2013, he published “The Implications of Fictional Media for Political Beliefs” in American Politics Research, which investigates the consequences of fictional, entertainment media for belief in conspiracy theories. He remains interested in the media’s influence on conspiracy beliefs, including recent work […]

Silvia Mari is an Associate Professor of Social Psychology at the Department of Psychology, University of Milano-Bicocca, where she currently teaches Attitudes and Opinions and Community Psychology. She received her Ph.D. in Social Psychology from the University of Padova in 2006. She is interested in the effect of the internet and social media use on […]

Stef Aupers is a cultural sociologist and works as professor of media culture at the Institute for Media Studies, Communication Sciences at Leuven University in Belgium. His work deals mostly with religion, spirituality, and re-enchantment in (post)secular Western societies. He supervised the NWO research project Conspiracy Culture in the Netherlands: Modernity and Its Cultural Discontents […]

Professor Stephan Lewandowsky is a cognitive scientist at the University of Bristol. He was an Australian Professorial Fellow from 2007 to 2012, and was awarded a Discovery Outstanding Researcher Award from the Australian Research Council in 2011. He held a Revesz Visiting Professorship at the University of Amsterdam in 2012, and received a Wolfson Research […]

Stephen Armstrong is a journalist and author. He writes extensively for the Sunday Times, Wired, the Guardian and others on culture, technology and social change. He has written five books: The White Island; War plc; The Super Rich Shall Inherit the Earth; The Road to Wigan Pier Revisited; and The New Poverty – part of the Unreported Britain […]

Sylvain Delouvée holds a Ph.D. in Social Psychology (Paris 5 University), and is currently an Associate professor (HDR) in Rennes 2 University (France). Formerly vice-president of his university, his research topics are focused on collective beliefs and social thought. He is particularly interested in behaviors and conduct known as irrational through conspiracy theories and rumours, […]

Tamás Scheibner is an assistant professor at the Institute of Cultural Studies and Hungarian Literature at Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest (ELTE). He is also a research fellow at the Institute of History at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature (ELTE, 2012), and M.A. degrees in History from the Central […]

Tanjev Schultz is a Full Professor of Journalism at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. For more than ten years he has worked as an editor and reporter for Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Germany’s largest quality daily newspaper located in Munich. His journalistic work has won several prizes and focused on politics, education, extremism, terrorism, and […]

Theofilos Gkinopoulos is a researcher at the University of Surrey. He has completed his Ph.D. in Social Psychology at the University of Surrey. He has also received a B.Sc. in Psychology from the Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences in Athens. For his Ph.D., he looked at identity entrepreneurship process in mainstream and minority […]

Thomas Philipp works as a scientist and artist in Linz, Austria. As one of the founders of the research institute LIquA (Linz Institute for Qualitative Analysis) and the art collective qujOchÖ, his work often operates at the interfaces between art, culture, and society as well as newly emerging phenomena in this context (e.g. hate speech […]

Todor Hristov teaches critical theory and cultural studies at the University of Sofia and sociology at the University of Plovdiv, Bulgaria. He has published six books on governmentality, social movements, and cultural studies as well as a number of papers on biopolitics, governmentality, critical political economy, new social movements, sociology of knowledge, and critical theory. […]

Dr. Tomas Balkelis is a senior research fellow at the Lithuanian Institute of History in Vilnius. He received his Ph.D. in History at the University of Toronto in 2004. He worked at the Universities of Manchester and Nottingham. During 2016, he was a visiting scholar at Stanford University. Throughout 2014 to 2016, he led a […]

Ute Caumanns is a lecturer at the Department of History and Cultures in Eastern Europe at the Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, Germany. She teaches modern and contemporary Central-East European history, and visual history in a comparative European perspective. She co-edited two volumes on conspiracy theories: Verschwörungstheorien: Anthropologische Konstanten – historische Varianten (2001) and ‚Wer zog die Drähte?’ […]

Vassiliki Georgiadou is an associate professor of political science at the Department of Political Science and History (Panteion University). She studied political science in Athens (Panteion) and in Münster/Germany (Institute of Politology) and holds a Ph.D. from the Faculty of Philosophy of the Westphalian Wilhelms University of Münster. Her research interests focus on far right […]

For thirty years Veronique Campion-Vincent has studied rumors and urban legends, adopting an anthropological approach. Together with Jean-Bruno Renard she co-authored three commented collections of urban legends in 1992, 2002, and 2014. She has published in English on rumors of wild animal releases (“Viper-Release Stories: A Contemporary French Legend.” A Nest of Vipers: Perspectives on […]

Victor A. Shnirelman, doctor in history, is a senior researcher at the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. His scholarly field is cultural anthropology. His research interests include nationalism, racism, ethnic conflicts, neo-paganism, cultural memory, politics of the past in the Soviet and post-Soviet world, eschatology, and theories […]

Viren Swami is a professor of social psychology at Anglia Ruskin University, UK and director of the Centre for Psychological Medicine at Perdana University, Malaysia. His research on conspiracy theories is based in the disciplines of social and differential psychology and is focused on understanding the antecedents and consequences of conspiracist ideation. In addition, a […]

Vladimir Turjačanin works as a professor of social psychology at the Department of Psychology, University of Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina. His professional interests lie in the area of intergroup relations, ethnicity, nationalism, social identity, gender stereotypes, religious and ethnic prejudice, and political attitudes among youth. Among other publications, he published several books: Complex Social Identities […]

Vlado Šakić has been a scientific advisor and director of the Ivo Pilar Institute of Social Sciences in Croatia since 1998. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Zagreb in 1991 and he received the State Prize for Science (area of humanities) for the book Croatian Diaspora in 2005. His research is based in the […]

Professor Yannis Stavrakakis studied political science at Panteion University, Athens, and received his MA degree from the Ideology and Discourse Analysis Programme at the University of Essex, where he also completed his PhD under the supervision of Ernesto Laclau. He has worked at the Universities of Essex and Nottingham before taking up a position at […]