Olav Hammer


Olav Hammer is a Swedish professor 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 in English. This volume, 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 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