David Belfon
is a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto’s Department for the Study of Religion and the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies. His main area of scholarly interest is leavetaking from conservative religious groups, especially how narratives relate to identity change. His dissertation explores the mechanics of leavetaking among formerly-Orthodox Jews in Toronto, investigating how social and religious boundaries and the institutionalisation of religious identity facilitate individualised disaffiliation.
Clemens Cavallin
is Associate Professor in religious studies at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, and has done research within Vedic religion, Ritual theory and Catholic studies. His latest book is a biography of the Canadian novelist and painter Michael O’Brien.
Ryan T. Cragun
is a professor of sociology at The University of Tampa. His research focuses on Mormonism and the nonreligious and has been published in various scholarly journals. He is also the author of several books.
Carole M. Cusack
is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Sydney. She trained as a medievalist and her doctorate was published as Conversion Among the Germanic Peoples (Cassell, 1998). She now researches primarily in contemporary religious trends and Western esotericism. Her books include (with Katharine Buljan) Anime, Religion and Spirituality: Profane and Sacred Worlds in Contemporary Japan (Equinox, 2015), Invented Religions: Imagination, Fiction and Faith (Ashgate, 2010), and The Sacred Tree: Ancient and Medieval Manifestations (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011). She has published widely in scholarly journals and edited volumes.
Daniel Enstedt
is an Associate Professor in Religious Studies at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. His current areas of research are contemporary religion in Western Europe, the sociology and psychology of religion, and he has examined questions about sexuality and Christianity through fieldwork and interviews with Christian LGBTQ-people, and priests that take a critical stance towards same-sex unions, as well as questions concerning leaving Islam in present-day
Miguel Farias
has been a Research Fellow and Lecturer in Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford and is the founding director of the Brain, Belief, & Behaviour Lab at Coventry University. He works on the psychobiology of beliefs and rituals, including pilgrimage and meditation practices. In 2017 he won the William Bier award, given by the American Psychological Association, Division 36, for his work on the psychology of religion and spirituality. His most recent book project is the Oxford Handbook of Meditation.
Niklas Foxeus
is a research fellow at the Department of History of Religions, ERG, Stockholm University. He received his PhD from that department, with a dissertation entitled “The Buddhist World Emperor’s Mission: Millenarian Buddhism in Postcolonial Burma” (2011). He is currently a Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities Research Fellow. His research examines varieties of Burmese Buddhism, including esoteric congregations, meditation, prosperity Buddhism, possession rituals, and Buddhist nationalism.
Amorette Hinderaker
(Ph.D., North Dakota State University) is an Associate Professor and the Convener of Debates at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas. Her research focuses on religious organisations and has been published in the Western Journal of Communication, Journal of Communication and Religion, Communication Studies, and Southern Journal of Communication. She also directs and coaches the competitive TCU Speech and Debate Team.
Philip Salim Francis
PhD is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Religion at the University of Maine Farmington and Director of Seguinland Institute. His recent book is called When Art Disrupts Religion: Aesthetic Experience and the Evangelical Mind (Oxford University Press).
Isabella Kasselstrand
is Associate Professor of Sociology at California State University, Bakersfield, where she teaches courses in quantitative analysis, sociology of religion, and secularity and nonreligion. She holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of
Lily Kong
Professor Lily Kong's research focuses on social and cultural change in Asian cities, and has studied topics ranging from religion to cultural policy, creative economy, urban heritage and conservation, and smart cities. She has won research and book awards, including from the Association of American Geographers and the Singapore National Book Development Council. Her latest book on religion, co-authored with Orlando Woods, is Religion and Space: Competition, Conflict and Violence in the Contemporary World (2016).
Göran Larsson
is a Professor of Religious Studies/History of Religions at the University of Gothenburg. His research focuses on Islam and Muslims in Europe in both past and present periods. Besides the study of Islam and Muslims, Larsson has also published on religion and media, migration, global conflicts and theoretical and methodological issues.
Monica Lindberg Falk
is associate professor of social anthropology and affiliated with the Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University, Sweden. Her research interests include Buddhism, gender, anthropology of disaster and social change in South-East Asia. Her scholarship includes extensive fieldwork in Thailand. She is the author of the monographs Making Fields of Merit: Buddhist Female Ascetics and Gendered orders in Thailand and Post-Tsunami Recovery in Thailand: Socio-cultural responses. She has published on themes related to gender and Buddhism, socially engaged Buddhism, Buddhism and disasters, education, and student mobility.
Erica Li Lundqvist
is an assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Malmö. She has a PhD in Islamic studies and her doctoral thesis Gayted Communities: Marginalized Sexualities in Lebanon focused on the strategies Muslim gay men in Lebanon develop to manage and create a positive correlation between their religious identity and their sexual orientation combined with an examination on how a gay identity is acquired, verified and played out in Lebanon. Her profilation has since then been on the intersection of sexuality and religion attempting to put queer theory in dialogue with the study of religion, specifically in relation to Islamic studies.
is associate professor of the study of religions at Mid Sweden university where he currently is employed, and of the history of religions at Uppsala university where he obtained his doctoral degree. His focus is on early Christianity, especially in its Gnostic expressions, see for instance Rethinking the Gospel of Truth: a study of its Eastern valentinian setting, Uppsala: Uppsala university press, 2006. Another interest of Magnusson’s is early Judaism, see for instance Judasevangeliet: text, budskap och historisk bakgrund, Lund: Arcus förlag, 2008. He has published on myth theoretical themes in, for instance, “Beyond righteousness and transgression: reading the Gospel of Truth and the Gospel of Judas from an acosmic perspective”, in Sjödin & Jackson (eds), Philosophy and the End of Sacrifice: disengaging ritual in ancient India, Greece and beyond, Sheffield: Equinox Publishing LTD, 2016. Recently, he has expanded is studies to include Manichaeism, “Mat och Manikeism” in Religion och Bibel, Uppsala: Nathan Söderblomsällskapet, 2018.
Teemu T. Mantsinen
(Ph.D., University of Turku) is an anthropologist of religion, and a researcher in Study of Religions at the University of Turku. His research interests include Pentecostal religion, social class, social change, leaving Pentecostalism, religion and language, and Orthodox Christian pilgrimage.
David L. McConnell
is Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Sociology and Anthropology Department at The College of Wooster in Wooster, Ohio. He has published numerous articles and books on Amish society, including (with Charles Hurst) An Amish Paradox: Diversity and Change in the World’s Largest Amish Settlement. His most recent book (with Marilyn Loveless) is Nature and the Environment in Amish Life (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018).
Kyle Messick
maintains the websites for the International Association for the Psychology of Religion and for The Religious Studies Project. He has been a prominent member of the Brain, Belief, & Behaviour Lab out of Coventry University and the Social Psychology of Religion Lab out of Indiana University South Bend. His areas of research specialisation include unbelief, prayer, the sacred, and heavy metal music culture. He is an advocate for open science practices and for reducing the gap between science and the general public's interpretation and consumption of science.
Ph.D. (2017), University of Otago (New Zealand) is a Research Associate in the Brain, Belief, and Behaviour research group at Coventry University (United Kingdom).
Lena Roos
is Professor of the Study of Religions, Södertörn University, Stockholm. Her main research areas include Judaism, religion and sexuality, religion and gardening, and Religious Education. She has published extensively on topics of Jewish history and culture, from the Middle Ages to contemporary times.
Caleb Schaffner
currently serves as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology at North Central College. He primarily researches non-theists, with an emphasis on the process of exiting from organised religion. He also researches opinion of race- and gender-targeted public policies.
Christine Schirrmacher
Professor Christine Schirrmacher, PhD, is a scholar of Islamic Studies, currently teaching as Professor of Islamic Studies at the Institute of Asian and Oriental Studies at the Department of Islamic Studies and Near Eastern Languages of the University of Bonn, Germany and the Protestant Theological Faculty at Leuven, Belgium (ETF). In 2013 she had a temporary professorship at the chair of Islamic Studies at the university of Erfurt, Germany, and in 2014, she was teaching as a guest professor at the university of Tuebingen, Germany. Schirrmacher had studied Islamic Studies, comparative religions, medieval and modern history and German literature and holds an M. A. and a PhD in Islamic Studies. Her doctoral dissertation dealt with the Muslim-Christian controversy in the 19th and 20th century, her dissertation for her postdoctoral lecture qualification (“Habilitation“) focused on contemporary Muslim theological voices on apostasy, human rights and religious freedom.
Michael Stausberg
is a professor of the study of religion/s at the University of Bergen (Norway). His publications revolve around matters of theory (including theories of religion, ritual, magic, and the sacred), research methods (including comparison), religion and tourism, early modern European intellectual history, and Zoroastrianism. A list of publications (including downloads) can be found at www.michaelstausberg.net.
is Associate Professor of Studies of Religions (religionsvitenskap) at the Institute of Cultural Studies and Oriental Languages (IKOS), University of Oslo. Her PhD work builds on fieldwork in the Coptic Orthodox minority in Egypt, and among Coptic migrants from Egypt/Sudan now settled in Great Britain. She continues doing research on different minority-groups in Norway. Recent publications appear in Belonging to the Church Community (Un. of South Carolina Press, 2017); Nordic Journal of Human Rights (2016); and De kristne i Midtøsten (Cappelen Damm 2015).
Peter G. Stromberg
is a cultural anthropologist who teaches at the University of Tulsa in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He is the author of Language and Self-Transformation: A study of the Christian conversion narrative (Cambridge, 1993).
Ryan Szpiech
is Associate Professor in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures and the Department of Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. He has published numerous articles on medieval polemics, translation, and religious conversion in the Western Mediterranean, and is the author of Conversion and Narrative: Reading and Religious Authority in Medieval Polemic (Penn, 2013), which won the "La Corónica International Book Award for Best Book in Medieval Hispanic Languages, Literatures, and Cultures" in 2015. He is also the editor of Medieval Exegesis and Religious Difference: Commentary, Conflict, and Community in the Premodern Mediterranean (Fordham, 2015), co-editor (with Charles Burnett, Josefina Rodríguez-Arribas, and Silke Ackermann) of Astrolabes in Medieval Culture (Brill, 2019), co-editor (with Mercedes García-Arenal and Gerard Wiegers) of Interreligious Encounters in Polemics between Christians, Jews, and Muslims in Iberia and Beyond (Brill 2019), and Editor-in-Chief of the journal Medieval Encounters.
Teemu Taira
is Senior Lecturer in Study of Religion, University of Helsinki and Docent in Study of Religion, University of Turku. He is co-author of Media Portrayals of Religion and the Secular Sacred (2013, with Kim Knott and Elizabeth Poole), author of four monographs (in Finnish) and he has published several articles about religion, media, atheism and methodology of religious studies in edited volumes and journals, such as Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Journal of Contemporary Religion and Religion. http://teemutaira.wordpress.com.
ThD, MEd, is a professor in Practical Theology at the University of Eastern Finland in Joensuu.
Hugh Turpin
is a cognitive anthropologist whose research examines the moral rejection of religion. In particular, his work focusses on the rejection of Catholicism in the Republic of Ireland and the complex nature of this phenomenon's relationships to Church scandals. He holds a joint PhD from Queen's University Belfast and Aarhus University, and masters degrees in anthropology (Oxford) and cognitive science (University College Dublin). His research interests include the decline of religious systems and beliefs, secularisation theory, the anthropologies of Christianity and Catholicism, and the anthropology and psychology of morality. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Coventry University and the University of Oxford.
Orlando Woods
is an Assistant Professor of Humanities at Singapore Management University. His research interests span religion, urban environments and space in/and Asia. He is the co-author of Religion and Space: Competition, Conflict and Violence in the Contemporary World (2016, with Lily Kong), and the author of various journal articles and book chapters on the politics of religious praxis in Asia. He holds BA (First Class Honours) and PhD degrees in Geography from University College London and the National University of Singapore respectively.