Olav Hammer


Olav Hammer is a Swedish professor emeritus at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense working in the field of history of religion.

Career

Hammer has written four books in Swedish and one monograph, Claiming Knowledge: Strategies of Epistemology from Theosophy to the New Age, and one co-authored book, Religious Innovation in the Hellenistic and Roman Periods in English. The monograph, which was also Hammer's doctoral dissertation in 2000 at Lund University, investigates the rhetorical strategies of legitimization of a number of related new religious movements. Hammer is also editor of several books, including Polemical Encounters, The Invention of Sacred Tradition, Alternative Christs, Cambridge Companion to New Religious Movements, and Western Esotericism in Scandinavia. He has published numerous articles and contributions to edited volumes on Western esotericism, new religious movements, new age religiosity, alternative archaeology, religion and science, and religious polemics.
He was from 2009 to 2016 one of two executive editors of the journal Numen.
In 2002 the title of in Sweden was bestowed on Hammer, by the society Föreningen Vetenskap och Folkbildning "for his balanced and pedagogical books about the history of new religions and the causes behind people's beliefs in pseudoscience."

Awards

  • 2002