When we began our project in 2013, we thought it was a mainly academic enterprise, but with the Brexit and US Presidential election campaigns it gained public significance. The world has entered the era of ‘post-truth’ and ‘alternative facts’ in which conspiracy theories have become part of the international currency of ‘fake news’ on the […]
I only have a very small part in the film Denial compared to those of David Irving (played by Timothy Spall), Richard Rampton QC (played by Tom Wilkinson), Anthony Julius (played by Andrew Scott), and Professor Deborah Lipstadt (played by Rachel Weisz), but I like to think it’s an important one. When Irving sued Deborah […]
Nayanika Mathur, University of Cambridge “Corruption. It’s like a demon sitting on my brain and eating it with a fork and knife.” So bemoans a character in the novelist Aravind Adiga’s Between the Assasinations set in India. While it is commonplace and easy to bemoan the pervasiveness of corruption in India, it is harder to […]
“It’s hard to question a category and measure with it at the same time” – it was in these terms that my colleague Alfred attempted to explain one of the many rifts running through a recent conference on conspiracy theories. Since the 1980s conspiracy theories have been discovered as a topic worthy of serious academic […]
Professor Deborah E. Lipstadt (Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies at Emory University) visited the project in May 2014. Holocaust denial, the attempt to deny that the Third Reich engaged in the annihilation of approximately of six million Jews, has been depicted as a serious threat to historical truth. Others have dismissed […]
A Public Lecture by Conspiracy & Democracy Visiting Fellow Stef Aupers (Erasmus University of Rotterdam) In the social sciences, a conspiracy theory is often disqualified as ‘irrational’ superstition or religious belief. In defense, conspiracy theorists present their methods of inquiry as utterly rational – often even more scientific than ‘dogmatic’ institutionalized science. In this lecture, […]
We recently had a visit from Joe Parent and Joe Uscinski, associate professors in political science at the University of Miami, who gave a public talk based on their forthcoming book: Conspiracy Theories in America (Oxford University Press). It was a great talk. They’ve put together a highly original data set, and they use […]
Professor Sir Richard Evans, Principal Investigator and overall director of the project spoke at this year’s Hay Festival (a celebration of Literature and the Arts) as part of the Cambridge Series events this past week. The Times (subscription) reported: Why the plot is thicker for Americans The International Business Times reported: JFK Assassination, 9/11 attacks, Diana’s Death: Why […]
Last year Hugo wrote on the blog about an article called “NASA Faked the Moon Landing – Therefore (Climate) Science is a Hoax: An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science“, by Stephan Lewandowsky, Klaus Oberauer and Gilles Gignac. Their main finding, based on a survey of climate-blog visitors, was that “endorsement of free market […]
My Historian colleagues assure me that conspiracy theories run high around the time of revolutions. Going by the feverish profusion of conspiracy theories in India currently, they must also exponentially multiply just before national elections. Another day I will write of the comical and, probably, more-or-less harmless ones. Right now I want to focus on […]