People

Clare Birchall is Professor of Contemporary Culture at King’s College London. She is the author of:

• Knowledge Goes Pop: From Conspiracy Theory to Gossip,
• Shareveillance: The Dangers of Openly Sharing or Covertly Collecting Data
• Radical Secrecy: The Ends of Transparency in Datafied America,
• Conspiracy Theories in the Time of Covid-19 (co-author with Peter Knight).

Her research centres on forms of ‘popular knowledge’, digital culture, secrecy, surveillance, and transparency. She is currently project leader on the EU-CHANSE REDACT project on conspiracy theories and digital culture across Europe.

Peter Knight is a professor of American Studies at the University of Manchester, and currently a research fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study. He is the Principal Investigator on the Everything Is Connected project. He also directed the Infodemic project, and the COMPACT network of conspiracy theory researchers.

He is the author of:

• Conspiracy Culture (2000)
• The Kennedy Assassination (2007)
• Reading the Market (2016)
• Invested (2022) (co-author)
• Conspiracy Theories in the Time of Covid-19 (co-author)
• Routledge Handbook of Conspiracy Theories (2020) (co-editor)

Marc Tuters is Assistant Professor at the Media Studies Department, University of Amsterdam. His work explores radical political subcultures online, including with ‘digital methods’ in affiliation with researchers at the Open Intelligence Lab and the Digital Methods Initiative.

Lars de Wildt is postdoctoral researcher in Media Studies at KU Leuven, working with Stef Aupers. He has been a visiting scholar at the universities of Tampere, Montréal, and Deakin (Melbourne). He studies how technologies change contemporary culture; including how online platforms changed conspiracy theory in a post-truth age; and how videogames changed religion in a post-secular age.

Annie Kelly is a postdoctoral researcher on the project, based at King’s College London. Her doctoral work at the University of East Anglia analysed antifeminist and far right digital cultures. She is the UK correspondent for the QAnon Anonymous podcast, and her writing has appeared in Soundings journal, The Sociological Review and The New York Times.

Stijn Peeters is a postdoctoral Rersearcher at the University of Amsterdam, working on research and research tools that focus on online political subcultures, as part of the Odycceus project and the Digital Methods Initiative. He is a research associate on the Everything Is Connected project.

Ed Spencer is one of the postdoctoral researchers on the project, attached to the University of Manchester, and he is also Lecturer I in Music at Magdalen College, University of Oxford.

His doctoral work investigated the alt-right weaponization of musical memes during Donald Trump’s rise to power, while his present research focuses on Beyoncé-related online conspiracy theories and the conspiratorial significance of two musical memes played by the Christchurch terrorist in March 2019.

He is currently co-editing a collection titled The Digital Sociology of Music: Music Studies After the Internet.

• Caroline Bassett (professor of Digital Humanities, Cambridge University)
• Michael Butter (professor of American Studies, University of Tübingen)
• Sybille Lammes (professor of New Media and Digital Cutlure, Leiden University)
• Sir David Omand (former director of GCHQ, and visiting professor at KCL)