Conspiracy Thinking and Conspiracy Studying

In July, 1997, the supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary included the term conspiracy theory for the first time. This inclusion recognized that conspiracy theories have become increasingly popular in recent years, most overtly in the United States, but also across the rest of the world. Just as striking is that this outpouring of suspicion has not been ignored or dismissed out of hand by academics. Indeed, the opposite has been the case—it has been matched by a relative feast of serious work studying conspiracy theory (seeking to theorize conspiracy theory, if you will) and at least a dozen books have been published, with more to come. Why has this union of interest come about and what can it tell us of the nature of this contemporary phenomenon?