George D. Chryssides, MA, BD, D.Phil.
Chair of the Management Committee

George studied philosophy and theology at the University of Glasgow and gained his doctorate from the University of Oxford. He was Head of Religious Studies at the University of Wolverhampton until he retired in 2008.

He is currently Honorary Research Fellow at York St John University and the University of Birmingham. His interest in new religious movements began in the early 1980s. He served as Consultant on New Religious Movements to the United Reformed Church and joined the Advisory Board of CENERM (Centre for New Religious Movements) at Selly Oak Colleges, which subsequently became part of the University of Birmingham, becoming its convenor from 1991 to 1996.

He has published extensively on new religions, and his books include Exploring New Religions (1999), Historical Dictionary of Jehovah’s Witnesses (2008), Historical Dictionary of New Religious Movements (2012), The Bloomsbury Companion to New Religious Movements (2014), and Jehovah’s Witnesses: Continuity and Change (2016). He has authored numerous journal articles and is a regular presenter at national and international conferences. He became president of the International Society for the Study of New Religions in 2018. George has been involved with Inform since its inception, and joined the Board of Governors in 2014, of which he is co-vice chair.

Professor Emerita Kim Knott, PhD

Professor Emerita of Religious and Secular Studies, Lancaster University. From 2015-20, Professor Knott was Deputy Director of the Centre for Research and Evidence on Security Threats (CREST) and led a research programme focused on actors and ideologies in social context.

Her research interests include ideological transmission and learning; the interrogation of religious and political spaces; spatial metaphors in religious and political discourse; the ‘secular sacred’; material religion; and religion, migration and diasporas.

Edward Graham-Hyde, PhD

Edd is the treasurer of Inform, a senior researcher with Church Army and an associate lecturer at the University of Central Lancashire. His doctoral research investigated the role of empowerment in the conversion of adherents into minority religions. His current research interests include ‘cultic’ discourses, empowerment studies, theological and sociological approaches to evangelism and the mapping of contemporary Christian church growth in the UK and Ireland. Edd is the co-editor of ‘Cult’ Rhetoric in the 21st Century: Deconstructing the Study of New Religious Movements (Bloomsbury 2024) and an assistant editor for the forthcoming Bloomsbury series ‘Religion at the Boundaries’.

Edd has been teaching at the University of Central Lancashire for over 10 years across a variety of subjects including sociology, public services, and religion, culture & society. He is particularly passionate about the role of religious studies in widening participation within FE and HE, advocating for this on the recent Theology and Religious Studies Benchmark Submission (2022) with QAA. Edd has been a continued vocal supporter of implementing compulsory religious studies in secondary education as a cross-curricular subject..

Aled Thomas, PhD

Aled is a Teaching Fellow in the Study of Religion at the University of Leeds. His research interests include fluid forms of contemporary religion, ‘cultic’ discourses, and theory and methods in the study of religion. His work places an emphasis on religion as an aspect of everyday life. Aled is the author of Free Zone Scientology: Contesting the Boundaries of a New Religion (Bloomsbury 2021) and co-editor of ‘Cult’ Rhetoric in the 21st Century: Deconstructing the Study of New Religious Movements (Bloomsbury 2024).

Aled has taught students at the Open University and University of Wolverhampton, before joining the University of Leeds in 2022, where he teaches subjects including research methods in the study of religion, the sociology of religion, religion and gender, and approaches to the academic study of religion. He is also Web Officer at the British Association for the Study of Religions and has presented papers on his research at conferences in the UK, Europe, and USA.

Suzanne Newcombe, PhD
Honorary Director

Suzanne is Honorary Director of Inform. She has worked at Inform in various capacities since 2002, responding to complex enquiries, giving media interviews on print, radio and televisions, updating the database, co-authoring commissioned reports, giving training to government departments and talks to schools. Her particular areas of expertise include movements with origins or inspirations from Asian and Indian traditions and contemporary groups which are interested in prophecy and the end of the world. Between 2015-2020 she works at Inform as a post-doctoral research fellow on AYURYOG, a European Research Council Horizon 2020 grant looking at the entangled Histories of Yoga, Ayurveda and Alchemy in South Asia. She is also a Senior Lecturer in Religious Studies at the Open University and on the Educational Sub-Committee for the Centre for the Critical Study of Apocalyptic and Millennial Movements (CenSAMM). Click here for information on her publications.

Sarah Harvey, PhD
Senior Research Officer

Sarah has been a researcher at Inform since 2001 and responds to many of the enquiries that Inform receives, helps maintain the database of religious movements and manages Inform commissioned projects. She has written several profiles for the Inform-CenSAMM collaborative project. She is particularly interested in Pagan religions, new Christian movements, and millennial movements. She has co-edited two volumes in the Routledge-Inform book series, including a volume on prophecy and another on counselling. Sarah’s PhD thesis is entitled ‘A Nicer Birth: Negotiating the Ideal and the Practical in Natural Birth’, in the School of European Culture and Languages, University of Kent. She has an undergraduate degree from the University of Manchester in Comparative Religion and Social Anthropology and a Masters degree from the London School of Economics and Political Science in Social Research Methods (Sociology). Click here for information on her publications.

Silke Steidinger, MSc, UKCP reg.
Research Officer

Silke has been Research Officer at Inform since 2006. At Inform, the primary focus of her work is researching religious groups for the Inform database and cataloguing the Inform library and has written several profiles for the CenSAMM-Inform collaboration. She also responds to enquiries and recently co-edited and contributed a chapter to the Inform-Routledge volume on New Religious Movements and Counselling (2017). Other publications include chapters on death in New Religious Movements. In 2004, she received an MSc in Religion in Contemporary Society (Sociology) from the London School of Economics, the focus of her dissertation being on death in New Religious Movements. In 1999, she received a BA (Hons) in Religious Studies from King’s College London. She is also a UKCP registered attachment-based psychoanalytic psychotherapist working for the NHS and in private practice. In 2018 she graduated from the Royal College of Art with an MA in Information Experience Design. Click here for information on her publications.

Warwick Hawkins
Office Manager

Warwick joined Inform as part-time office manager in December 2017. He is the only non-academic member of the team, having been a career civil servant for 28 years. As head of the faith communities engagement team in the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government, he used to manage the department’s relationship with Inform. As well as bringing valuable experience of the working of government, Warwick leads on financial management, correspondence and event organising. After taking early retirement from the civil service he started his own social enterprise, Faith in Society, which aims to build the capacity of faith groups to be involved in civil society. This work continues to bring him into contact with representative bodies, places of worship and charities from a wide variety of faith traditions – contacts and expertise which he is pleased to bring to his work with Inform.

Ruby Forrester, Intern/Assistant Research Officer

Ruby joined Inform as an Assistant Research Officer in September 2020. Her primary roles consist of growing Inform’s social media profile, assisting with updating our database, writing factsheets, and undertaking research on specific funded projects. Ruby has recently completed a Masters degree in Religion at Kings College London where she focused on using New Religious Movement research to understand QAnon’s propensity for future violence. She also has an undergraduate degree from Cardiff University in Religious Studies and English Literature.

Anna Kira Hippert, MA, Intern/Assistant Research Officer

Anna joined Inform for an internship in April 2021. She is a PhD candidate located at the CERES – Center for Religious Studies in Bochum, Germany. In her Bachelor’s she studied Art History and Study of Religion and holds a Master’s degree in the Study of Religion. Besides the American religious landscape as well as Niche Evangelicalism, notably “Cowboy Christianity”, Anna focuses on New Religious Movements (The Church of Scientology and The Raelian Movement). The main emphasis of her dissertation is on media self-presentation of NRMs via images on websites, along with the accompanying connection between online and offline. Since April 2021, she has been helping Inform with manifold tasks, such as creating fact sheets for specific an NRMs and working on the database. Anna also supports inform with visits from Germany to the office, as well as adding a new perspective of NRMs by introducing the dimension of materiality and images to the research.

Professor Eileen Barker

Founder of Inform; Professor Emeritus at the London School of Economics. Sociologist of Religion, she has been researching minority religions and the responses to which they give rise since the early 1970s. Her study of conversion to the Unification Church for her PhD, led to an interest in a wide variety of movements, and she has personally studied, to greater or lesser degree, over 150 different groups. As the first-generation movements aged, she became interested in the changes, particularly the arrival of second-generation members and those who leave the movements. For the past twelve years, she’s been interested in differences between ‘cult-watching’ groups and the dynamics within and between these groups and the religions. She has over 300 publications, translated into 27 languages. She travels extensively for research purposes, particularly in North America, Europe and Japan, and, since collapse of the Berlin Wall, in Eastern Europe and, more recently, China. She was the first non-American to be elected President of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. Click here for information on some of her publications.

Professor Jean La Fontaine
PhD

Professor Emeritus, Department of Anthropology, London School of Economics and Political Science. Jean carried out anthropological fieldwork in eastern Uganda, later in Kinshasa (Democratic Republic of Congo) and finally in England, where she has studied the sexual abuse of children and the effects of beliefs in spirit possession and in witchcraft. Jean has long been interested in ritual and has publications on initiation and on witchcraft. From 1992-94, as an Honorary Research Fellow of Inform, who managed the project, she undertook research for the Dept. of Health into the allegations of satanic ritual abuse in England. Her report in 1994 was expanded into the book, Speak of the Devil. She then turned to a study of children in the African diaspora who were accused of witchcraft. She edited the Inform publication entitled The Devil’s Children: From Spirit Possession to Witchcraft, New Allegations That Affect Children. Her most recent publication, Witches and Demons, is a collection of essays on witchcraft and beliefs that incite to abuse and murder. Click here for information on some of her publications.

Bernard Doherty
PhD

Doctor Bernard Doherty has been an honorary research fellow with Inform since 2015. He was previously a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor University and a sessional lecturer in the Department of Ancient History at Macquarie University. He has previously taught at the Australian Catholic University. Bernard is currently course director in the School of Theology at Charles Sturt University. Bernard is also a researcher in the Centre for Public and Contextual Theology (PaCT) and an adjunct lecturer in the School of Law at the University of Notre Dame (Sydney). His research interests are wide ranging and include early Christian and Australian religious history, New Religions and the media, New Religions and public policy, religion and politics, religious sectarianism, and the study of the development of religious pluralism in post-WWII Australia. Bernard has published in a number of journals including the Journal of Religious History, Nova Religio, the International Journal for the Study of New Religions, the Alternative Spirituality and Religions Review, Phronema, and the Journal of the Australian Catholic Historical Society.