As an author and journalist Dr. David V. Barrett researches and writes mainly on religious and esoteric subjects. He has been a full-time freelance writer since 1991; before that he was a teacher of Religious Studies and English, a computer programmer and intelligence analyst for the British and American governments and a journalist.

His many books include The New Believers (Cassell 2001), a major study of new religious movements, A Brief History of Secret Societies (Constable & Robinson 2007), A Brief Guide to Secret Religions (Constable & Robinson 2011) and The Fragmentation of a Sect (OUP 2013) which is based on his doctoral thesis.

In 2009 he was awarded a PhD in Sociology of Religion by the London School of Economics. He is a frequent speaker on aspects of minority religions on radio and television and at conferences and meetings.

His work has appeared in mainstream and alternative newspapers and magazines, scholarly journals, books and websites in the UK, the USA and (translated) in other countries. He has contributed to numerous encyclopaedias on religion, alternative beliefs and science fiction and fantasy. His short fiction has appeared in a number of books and magazines in several countries, and he has edited two science fiction short story anthologies, the most recent to be published in spring 2015. He has played fretless bass in a variety of rock, folk and blues bands. He lives in London, UK.

David G. Bromley is Professor of Religious Studies and Sociology in the School of World Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University. After completing an undergraduate degree in Sociology at Colby College, I pursued graduate work in Sociology at Duke University, earning a Ph.D. in 1971. During and after my graduate work at Duke, I served on the faculty at the University of Virginia in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology. I returned to Virginia when I joined the VCU faculty in 1983 as Chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology. In the intervening years, I served as Chair of the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work at the University of Texas at Arlington and as Chair of the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Criminal Justice at the University of Hartford.

During the early part of my career, I worked in the areas of Urban Sociology, Political Sociology, Social Movements, the Sociology of Deviance, and Criminology. It was my interest in Social Movements and Deviance that led to my initial research on contemporary religious movements and then, more broadly, in the Sociology of Religion. My current work focuses predominantly on religion and religious movements.

I am author or editor on over twenty books, mostly in the areas of religion and religious movements, with a primary interest in contemporary religious movements. In addition, I have authored many journal articles and book chapters in this area. This work includes research on a number of new religious movements, such as Unificationism and Scientology, and theoretical issues, such as conversion/defection processes, constructing typologies of religious groups, structural factors in the emergence of new forms of religion, and the connection between religion and violence. I am currently preparing a second edition of Cults and New Religions: A Brief History (Wiley/Blackwell, 2006), co-authored with Douglas Cowan. The first edition has now been translated into German, Japanese, and Czech editions. My next major project will be a book, Dangerous Religion , that explores the potential and peril of organizing marginal populations in a religious mode.

One way that I have sought to advance the study of new religious movements by bringing together leading scholars who study new religions to address both research and pedagogical issues. For example, Teaching New Religious Movements (Oxford University Press, 2007) is a volume that is part of Oxford’s “Teaching Religious Studies” series. The book seeks to further creativity in teaching about new expressions of religion by providing faculty with state of the art knowledge and classroom techniques to enhance their teaching. In Cults, Religion, and Violence (Cambridge University Press, 2001), I worked with J. Gordon Melton to bring together an international set of scholars who addressed the complex issue of violence through case studies of some of the most high profile cases of violence involving new religious movements in the late twentieth century. In The Satanism Scare (Aldine de Gruyter, 1991), I collaborated with James Richardson and Joel Best in bringing together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to analyze the rise and fall of a major social panic episode over putative subversive satanic cults that swept through the United States and a number of other nations during the 1980s.

Another major project that I am currently developing to advance the study of religious movements is the World Religions and Spirituality Project. WRSP is an online reference work that is assembling a range of resources that are useful to scholars, media representatives, religious leaders, and government agencies with an interest in religious organization. The core of WRSP is WRSP Profiles of religious groups authored by leading scholars from around the world. WRSP also offers the WRSP Forum, which sponsors interviews with key figures in the study of religion; an Articles/Papers section, which supplements the WRSP Profiles; an Archive section, which contains a listing of archival sources available to scholars as well as on-site primary sources; and an WRSP Videos section, which supplements texts with online video materials.

In scholarly associations, I have served as President of the Association for the Association of Religion and as Editor of the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion , published by the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. In 1991, I founded the annual series, Religion and the Social Order , which is sponsored by the Association for the Sociology of Religion. The series was established to address both theoretical and substantive emerging issues in the sociological study of religion. I edited the series, and several individual volumes, through its first ten volumes. Twenty-three volumes have now been published, currently through Brill Publishers.

My teaching has involved both more traditional lecture/discussion and more innovative experiential learning modalities. In all of my courses I emphasize sociological analysis that emphasizes a structural, critical orientation. I have been particularly interested in integrating teaching and scholarly activities in a way that foster student participation within this context. White Racism and Black Americans (Schenkman/General Learning Press, 1972) developed out of a teaching project with Charles Longino at the University of Virginia. Students read and evaluated over 1,000 articles and books to produce a book that they designed to be most informative on structural racism in America. More recently, I developed the World Religions in Richmond Project. WRR is an online resource that identifies and profiles the diverse array of religious traditions present in the Richmond, Virginia metropolitan area. Students in Religious Studies and Sociology conduct fieldwork and draft profiles of Richmond-area religious groups. WRR has compiled an extensive set of group profiles and has been accepted as an affiliate of The Pluralism Project at Harvard University.

David Cook is associate professor of religion at Rice University specializing in Islam. He did his undergraduate degrees at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 2001. His areas of specialization include early Islamic history and development, Muslim apocalyptic literature and movements (classical and contemporary), radical Islam, historical astronomy and Judeo-Arabic literature. His first book, Studies in Muslim Apocalyptic , was published by Darwin Press in the series Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam. Two further books, Understanding Jihad (Berkeley: University of California Press) and Contemporary Muslim Apocalyptic Literature (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press) were published during 2005, and Martyrdom in Islam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2007) as well as Understanding and Addressing Suicide Attacks (with Olivia Allison, Westport, Conn.: Praeger Security Press, 2007), and other books. Cook is continuing to work on classical Muslim apocalyptic literature, translating the sources, such as Nu`aym b. Hammad al-Marwazi’s Kitab al-fitan , as well has having recently become the co-editor for Edinburgh University Press’ series on Islamic Apocalyptic and Eschatology (with Christian Lange of the University of Utrecht). He is also sponsoring research on Boko Haram’s ideology, working with Ph.D. student Abdul Basit Kassem and Rice University Post-Graduate Fellow Michael Nwankpa on the group’s texts and videos in order to translate them into English.

David Ownby is Professor of History at the Université de Montréal in Montreal, Canada.  He is a noted authority on the history of popular movements and popular religion in modern and contemporary China.  He has published widely on the history of secret societies, helped to create the field of “redemptive societies,” and has translated religious scriptures and Chinese scholarship on the history of Chinese religion.

Devin Lander is New York’s State Historian and Head of Museum Chartering for the State Education Department.  Previous to being named State Historian, he was the Executive Director of the Museum Association of New York (MANY) and worked as Deputy Legislative and Policy Director for the Chair of the New York State Assembly’s Tourism, Arts, Parks and Sports

Donald Baker is the professor of Korean Civilization in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. He received his Ph.D. in Korean history from the University of Washington in 1983 and has taught at UBC since 1987.  Among his many publications on Korea is Korean Spirituality (University of Hawaii Press, 2008).

Elizabeth Phillips served as a Research Assistant for the World Religions and Spirituality Project, 2012-2013. She is co-author of the El Niño Fidencio and Cowboy Churches profiles.

Elizabeth Harper is a writer and independent scholar based in Los Angeles, California. Her areas of interest include Folk Catholicism and Catholic death rituals. She has lectured on the Cult of the Dead as part of the Bishop Walter F. Sullivan Catholic Studies lecture series and her essays and photos have been published on Hazlitt, Slate, and Killing the Buddha. Her blog, All the Saints You Should Know, has been profiled in Los Angeles Magazine and VICE Italia. She is a scholar in residence at the Morbid Anatomy Museum in Brooklyn, New York.

Elizabeth Miller is in the final year of her doctoral studies at the University of Sydney. Her thesis charts the extraordinary growth of Pentecostal and Charismatic churches in Australia over the last forty years, introducing historical analysis that has been notably absent from the small body of existing literature on the topic, alongside examination of the current form of the movement.  Elizabeth’s thesis makes a case study of five key churches: Hillsong, C3, Planetshakers, Influencers, and Newfrontiers, all of which have churches both in Australia and overseas. Her research interests include the intersections of religion and popular culture, the fluidity of individual and group identity, the gendered dynamics of lived religious experience, and the ways religious change in Australia reflects broader political, economic, and cultural change.

Emily C. Dunn researches new religious movements and Protestantism in China. She received her Ph.D. in Asian History from the University of Melbourne in 2011. She now teaches part-time at the University of Melbourne’s Asia Institute.