Max-Planck Institute: Department of Socio-Cultural Diversity, Germany
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Dr Chris Cotter is Research Fellow in Religious Studies at the School of Divinity, University of Edinburgh, working on a three-year project on 'unbelief' in Northern Ireland and Scotland. He is currently writing a monograph with Bloomsbury, titled The Critical Study of Non-Religion: Discourse, Identification, and Locality. He is co-editor of Social Identities between the Sacred and the Secular (Ashgate, 2013), After World Religions: Reconstructing Religious Studies (Routledge, 2016), and New Atheism: Critical Perspectives and Contemporary Debates (Springer, 2017), and is Co-Director at the Nonreligion and Secularity Research Network.
Dr. Jesse M. Smith is Associate Professor of Sociology at Western Michigan University. An interpretive sociologist and social psychologist, his research interests are focused primarily on the relationship of secularity and nonreligion to identity, the self, social deviance, and collective action. He has published thirty research articles, book chapters, book reviews, and other papers in journals including Sociology of Religion, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Qualitative Sociology, Journal of Religion and Health, and Secularism and Nonreligion . He is editor (along with Ryan T. Cragun) of the forthcoming book, Secularity and Nonreligion in North America (Bloomsbury Press). He is a Research Affiliate with the Non-religion and Secularity Research Network and on the Board of Directors with the nonprofit Humanist Global Charity.
Jack David Eller holds a PhD in Anthropology from Boston University, for which he conducted fieldwork on Australian Aboriginal religion and culture. His areas of interest include anthropology of religion, anthropology of violence, and psychological anthropology. He is the author of numerous articles and several books, including "Introducing Anthropology of Religion" (Routledge, 2014), "Cruel Creeds, Virtuous Violence: Religious Violence across Culture and History" (Prometheus, 2010), "Psychological Anthropology for the 21st Century" (Routledge, 2018), "Natural Atheism" (American Atheist Press, 2004), and "Atheism Advanced" (American Atheist Press, 2007).
