Matthew D. Atkinson is an assistant professor of political science at Long Beach City College. He received his doctorate from UCLA and his work has been published in the The Journal of Politics, The British Journal of Political Science, Quarterly Journal of Political Science, Political Research Quarterly, and PS: Political Science & Politics.
David C. Barker is Director of the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies and Professor of Political Science at American University and the author of Rushed to Judgment: Talk Radio, Persuasion, and American Political Behavior and Representing Red and Blue: How the Culture Wars Change the Way Citizens Speak and Politicians Listen.
Lee Basham is a professor of philosophy at South Texas College and the University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley. One of the first contemporary philosophers to defend the rational legitimacy of conspiracy theorizing, he is author of a number of journal articles and book chapters on epistemic issues in Western information hierarchies, as well as on social science assumptions and practices surrounding the evaluation of conspiracy theorizing and theorists.
Michal Bilewicz is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Warsaw, Poland, where he chairs the Center for Research on Prejudice. His research interests include conspiracy theories, reconciliation processes, dehumanization, prejudice, and collective moral emotions. In 2013 he co-edited a special issue of Journal of Social Issues on the consequences of genocide, and in 2015 a volume entitled The Psychology of Conspiracy.
Preston R. Bost earned his doctorate in cognitive psychology from Vanderbilt University in 1998. He joined the Wabash College faculty two years later, and for fifteen years has taught a wide range of courses focusing on cognitive processes such as visual perception, communication, decision making, and memory. For the last several years, he and his student collaborators have been conducting studies on the psychology of conspiracy beliefs; his most recent article on the topic appears in the January/February 2015 issue of Skeptical Inquirer magazine.
Michael Butter has been a Professor of American Literary and Cultural History at the University of Tübingen since 2014. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Bonn in 2007 and his Habilitation from the University of Freiburg in 2012. He is the author of three monographs: The Epitome of Evil: Hitler in American Fiction, 1939-2002 (2009), Plots, Designs, and Schemes: American Conspiracy Theories from the Puritans to the Present (2014), and Der »Washington-Code«: Zur Heroisierung amerikanischer Präsidenten, 1775-1865 (2016). He is currently completing an introduction to conspiracy theories, to be published in German by Suhrkamp in 2018. Together with Peter Knight, he is the co-director of the EU COST Action COMPACT [Comparative Analysis of Conspiracy Theories], and co-editor of the Routledge series Research in Conspiracy Theories, and the forthcoming Routledge Handbook of Conspiracy Theories.
Aleksandra Cichocka is a Senior Lecturer in Political Psychology at the University of Kent, where she leads the Political Psychology Lab and the MSc in Political Psychology. She is a member of the Governing Council of the International Society of Political Psychology. Her research interests include group identification and intergroup relations (especially the role of collective narcissism), political ideology, and political behavior.
Jay T. Cullen is a Professor of Oceanography at the University of Victoria. His research specialty is the chemistry of metals and artificial radioactive isotopes in seawater and living organisms. He was awarded the Craigdarroch Research Award for Excellence in Knowledge Mobilization and named Provost's Engaged Scholar at the University in recognition of his efforts in science communication, education and public outreach. Cullen is project lead of the Integrated Fukushima Ocean Radionuclide Monitoring project that is investigating the impact of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster on ocean and public health in Canada. He was also shortlisted in the competition to become one of Canada's next astronauts during the Canadian Space Agency's 2016 Astronaut Recruitment campaign. He lives with his wife and three children in Victoria, British Columbia.
M R. X. Dentith received their PhD in Philosophy from the University of Auckland, where they wrote their dissertation on the epistemology of conspiracy theories. Author of the first single-author book on conspiracy theories by a philosopher (The Philosophy of Conspiracy Theories), their current research interest is in developing a framework for the investigation of conspiracy theories, focusing on the role of expertise and evidence evaluation in complex epistemic communities. They also have a side project developing an account of how we might talk about the epistemology of secrecy generally, which should probably be kept secret until such time it is ready to be leaked to the public.
Darin DeWitt is an assistant professor of political science at California State University, Long Beach. He received his PhD from UCLA and his scholarship has been published in Celebrity Studies, PS: Political Science and Politics, and Urban Affairs Review.
Nicholas DiFonzo is Professor of Psychology at Rochester Institute of Technology. He has published over 40 articles, book chapters, encyclopedia entries and technical reports on rumor, and given over 50 presentations and invited addresses at academic conferences on rumor. His books include Rumor Psychology: Social & Organizational Approaches (written with Prashant Bordia) and The Watercooler Effect: A Psychologist Explores the Extraordinary Power of Rumors, which has been translated into six different languages. He has been interviewed by NPR, CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and The Los Angeles Times, and routinely assists the press in the analysis of rumor and gossip. Dr. DiFonzo has served as an expert trial witness for corporations and government entities on the topics involving defamatory workplace rumors, malicious product rumors, and slanderous conspiracy rumors.
Karen M. Douglas is a Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Kent. She studies the psychology of conspiracy theories, including the psychological factors and processes associated with conspiracy belief, and the consequences of conspiracy theories for people's political, health and environmental decisions.
Hugo Drochon is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the Conspiracy and Democracy Project at CRASSH, University of Cambridge. He is the author of Nietzsche's Great Politics (2016) and is currently working on the history of elites and democracy in the 20th century.
Asbjørn Dyrendal is Professor in History of Religions at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. His primary research interests revolve around new religious movements and conspiracy culture, of which the latter currently takes most of his time. Recent work includes The Invention of Satanism (co-author, Oxford University Press 2016) and the forthcoming Handbook of Conspiracy Theory and Contemporary Religion (co-editor, 2018).
Adam M. Enders is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Louisville. He is the coauthor of articles on the interaction between conspiratorial thinking and partisanship appearing in the British Journal of Political Science and Research and Politics, as well as other articles on mass polarization and value orientations.
Tanya Filer is a Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge, based at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH). At CRASSH, she is a member of the Leverhulme Trust Conspiracy and Democracy Project. Her current research examines the intersections of media, political communications and digital technologies, with a regional focus on Latin America. Her work appears in journals including Information, Communication & Society; The International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society; and Hispanic Research Journal. Tanya serves on the Council on the Future of Information and Entertainment at the World Economic Forum.
Ted Goertzel is emeritus professor of sociology at Rutgers University in Camden, NJ, and adjunct professor at Washington State Community College in Marietta, Ohio. His publications include "Belief in Conspiracy Theories," (Political Psychology 1994), "The Conspiracy Meme," (Skeptical Inquirer 2011), "Conspiracy Theories in Science" (2010) and Turncoats and True Believers (1992). He also publishes on Brazilian politics and on artificial general intelligence.
Ginna Husting is Associate Professor of Sociology & the Director of Gender Studies at Boise State University. Her research spans sociology, cultural studies, feminist political theory, and symbolic interaction, focusing on identity change, popular political culture, emotion, Hannah Arendt, and belonging/otherness.
Brian L. Keeley is Professor of Philosophy at Pitzer College in Claremont, California, where he also teaches in the Science, Technology & Society and Neuroscience Programs, in addition to serving as Extended Graduate Faculty in Philosophy at Claremont Graduate University. In addition to having edited a volume in the Cambridge University Press Contemporary Philosophy in Focus series on Paul Churchland, he has published over 40 articles, book chapters, and reviews on topics including the philosophy of neuroscience, the nature of the senses, artificial life, and the unusual epistemology of contemporary conspiracy theories.
Peter Knight is a professor of American Studies at the University of Manchester, UK, where he is chair of the department of English Literature, American Studies and Creative Writing. He is the author of Conspiracy Culture: From the Kennedy Assassination to "The X-Files" (2000), The Kennedy Assassination (2007) and Reading the Market: Genres of Financial Capitalism in Gilded Age America (2016). He is the editor of Conspiracy Nation: The Politics of Paranoia in Postwar America (2002) and Conspiracy Theories in American History: An Encyclopedia (2004, 2 vols). Together with Michael Butter, he is the co-director of the EU COST Action COMPACT [Comparative Analysis of Conspiracy Theories], and co-editor of the Routledge series Research in Conspiracy Theories, and the forthcoming Routledge Handbook of Conspiracy Theories.
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 Merit Award from the Royal Society upon moving to the UK in 2013. His research examines people's memory, decision making, and knowledge structures, with a particular emphasis on how people update information in memory. He has published over 140 scholarly articles, chapters, and books, including numerous papers on how people respond to corrections of misinformation and what variables determine people's acceptance of scientific findings. (See www.cogsciwa.com for a complete list of scientific publications.) Professor Lewandowsky is an award-winning teacher and was Associate Editor of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition from 2006-2008. His research has been funded continuously since 1990 by public agencies in 5 countries. He has also contributed nearly 50 opinion pieces to the global media on issues related to climate change "skepticism" and the coverage of science in the media. He is currently serving as Digital Content Editor for the Psychonomic Society and blogs routinely on cognitive research at www.psychonomic.org.
Marta Marchlewska is a researcher at the University of Warsaw (Institute for Social Studies and Department of Psychology). Her main research interests focus on psychological underpinnings and consequences of beliefs in conspiracy theories (with particular emphasis on defensive self-esteem, defensive in-group identification, need for cognitive closure and emotion regulation strategies).
Morgan Marietta is Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Massachusetts Lowell. He is also the author of A Citizen's Guide to American Ideology: Conservatism and Liberalism in Contemporary Politics, The Politics of Sacred Rhetoric: Absolutist Appeals and Political Persuasion, A Citizen's Guide to the Constitution and the Supreme Court: Constitutional Conflict in American Politics, and One Nation, Two Realities: Dueling Facts in American Democracy (forthcoming from Oxford University Press, with David Barker).
Andrew McKenzie-McHarg is a research fellow on the Leverhulme-funded project "Conspiracy and Democracy: History, Political Theory and Internet Research" at the University of Cambridge. His interests have extended from anti-Jesuit rhetoric in the Early Modern Period to radical streams of thought in late Enlightenment Germany. He is currently completing a book on the conceptual history of conspiracy theory.
Alfred Moore is a lecturer in political theory at the University of York. He works on political theory, deliberative 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 a Democracy Fellow at the Ash Center at Harvard University. Until 2017 he was a research fellow at Cambridge University working on the Leverhulme Trust project 'Conspiracy and Democracy: History, Political theory, Internet,' which supported the writing of this chapter.
Türkay Salim Nefes is a research fellow at the Sociology department of the University of Oxford. He is also a William Golding Junior Research Fellow at the Brasenose College of the University of Oxford. His main research interest is on the diffusion and impacts of conspiracy theories and anti-Semitism. Türkay has published his work on conspiracy rhetoric in various academic journals including British Journal of Sociology. He is the author of Online Anti-Semitism in Turkey and various journal articles.
Kathryn S. Olmsted is a professor of history at the University of California, Davis. She is the author of four books: Right Out of California: The 1930s and the Big Business Roots of Modern Conservatism (New Press, 2015); Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11 (Oxford, 2009); Red Spy Queen: A Biography of Elizabeth Bentley (North Carolina, 2002); and Challenging the Secret Government: The Post-Watergate Investigations of the CIA and FBI (North Carolina, 1996). She has also co-edited a book on the history of the Central Intelligence Agency and published several journal articles and book chapters that highlight her overlapping areas of expertise: conspiracy theories, government secrecy, espionage, counterintelligence, and anticommunism.
Martin Orr is Professor of Sociology at Boise State University. His research and teaching interests include social inequality, political sociology, globalization, social movements, mass media, and the environment. He has published on anti-globalization movements, the role of oil in social development and foreign policy, sociological theory, and the politics of "conspiracy theory."
Josh Pasek is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies, Faculty Associate in the Center for Political Studies, and Core Faculty for the Michigan Institute for Data Science at the University of Michigan. His research explores how new media and psychological processes each shape political attitudes, public opinion, and political behaviors. Josh also examines issues in the measurement of public opinion including techniques for reducing measurement error and improving population inferences. His work has been published in Public Opinion Quarterly, Political Communication, Communication Research, and The Journal of Communication, among other outlets.
Scott Radnitz is an Associate Professor in the Jackson School of International Studies and Director of the Ellison Center for Russian, East European, and Central Asian Studies at the University of Washington. He does research on post-Soviet politics, covering topics such as protests, authoritarianism, identity, and state building. He is the author of Weapons of the Wealthy: Predatory Regimes and Elite-Led Protests in Central Asia. His publications include Comparative Politics, Comparative Political Studies, British Journal of Political Science, Journal of Democracy, Foreign Policy, and Slate.
Juha Räikkä is a professor of philosophy at the University of Turku, Finland. His research interests concern issues of privacy, justice, forgiveness, self-deception, and minority rights. He has published papers in journals such as The Monist, Metaphilosophy, The Journal of Political Philosophy, Bioethics, The Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Utilitas, Res Publica, The Journal of Value Inquiry, and Social Theory and Practice.
David G. Robertson is Lecturer in Religious Studies at the Open University, and co-founder of the Religious Studies Project. His work applies critical theory to the study of alternative and emerging religions and conspiracy theories. He is the author of UFOs, the New Age and Conspiracy Theories: Millennial Conspiracism (2016) and co-editor of the Handbook of Conspiracy Theories and Contemporary Religion (2018).
Steven M. Smallpage is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Stetson University. He has coauthored work on conspiracy thinking and polarization. His main research areas are American political psychology and the history of political liberalism.
Wiktor Soral is a researcher at the University of Warsaw (Institute for Social Studies and the Center for Research on Prejudice), Poland. His main research interest focus on the role of negative psychological factors (e.g. lack of control, uncertainty, threat) in processing of social information (related to self, in-group and out-group). In 2015 he co-edited a volume The Psychology of Conspiracy.
Jan-Willem van Prooijen is Associate Professor at the Department of Experimental and Applied Psychology at VU Amsterdam, and Senior Researcher at the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement. His current research interests include conspiracy theories, justice and morality, and ideological extremism.
Jesse Walker is books editor of Reason Magazine and author of The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory (2013).
Drew Wegner is a JD Candidate at Harvard Law School.
Michael J. Wood is a Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Winchester. He completed his PhD at the University of Kent in 2013 in the psychology of conspiracy theories, and continues to study how conspiracy theories fit into broader worldviews and how they are communicated via social media and other online discussion platforms.
Ilya Yablokov received his doctoral degree from the University of Manchester in 2014. His research interests include conspiracy theories, nation building and politics in post-Soviet Russia; the history of post-Soviet journalism; and international broadcasting. His work has been published in a number of peer-reviewed journals. In 2015, he won the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies Prize for the best peer-reviewed article published by a post-graduate student. His book Fortress Russia: Conspiracy Theories in the Post-Soviet World will be published in June 2018. Ilya teaches Russian politics, history and media at the University of Leeds (UK).
