Pagan studies
The earliest academic studies of contemporary paganism were published between 1970 and 1980 by scholars like Margot Adler, Marcello Truzzi and Tanya Luhrmann, although it would not be until the 1990s that the actual pagan studies discipline properly developed, pioneered by academics such as Graham Harvey and Chas S. Clifton.
[8] The first international academic conference on the subject of Pagan studies was held at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, North-East England in 1993.
[9] In April 1996 a larger conference dealing with contemporary Paganism took place at Ambleside in the Lake District, organised by the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Lancaster, North-West England.
[9][10] In that anthology, some of the conference's organisers described its original intentions, remarking that through it they "sought to explore the innovations in practice and belief which constitute contemporary Paganism, and which appear to be a part of a widespread cultural response to the decay of main-line religions and to a widely felt awareness of ecological crisis.
In 1999, the American sociologist Helen A. Berger of West Chester University published A Community of Witches, a sociological study of the Wiccan and Pagan movement in the north-eastern United States.
[15] In 2005, ABC-CLIO published an anthology entitled Modern Paganism in World Cultures, which was edited by the American religious studies scholar Michael F. Strmiska.
Among the first scholars to study contemporary paganism from a historical perspective was the American Wiccan Aidan Kelly, who had been a founding member of the New Reformed Orthodox Order of the Golden Dawn and the Covenant of the Goddess during the 1970s.
"[21] The religious studies scholar Markus Altena Davidsen published a critique of the field in 2012, via a review of the Handbook of Contemporary Paganism.
He argued that Pagan studies was dominated by an essentialist and normative view of its subject rather than a naturalist and theoretically oriented approach.
