Edward Banchs is an independent researcher and freelance writer based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His writings about the metal subculture in the African continent have primarily focused on how metal has interacted with its locality and how metal fans have risen to confront the challenges that they have faced. His writings have appeared in publications such as Metal Hammer, The Guardian and Afropop.

Tom Cardwell is an artist and researcher based in London, UK. His PhD thesis (2017) employed painting practice and ethnography to examine the customised jackets made by heavy metal fans. His research interests include contemporary and historic painting, subcultural symbolism and expressions of personal narrative and identity in popular image traditions. Cardwell’s book Heavy Metal Armour (Intellect, 2022) brings together his battle jacket paintings and academic research to offer an interdisciplinary study of jacket making in metal subcultures. In 2022, Cardwell was awarded the Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Arts at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. He is Senior Lecturer in Painting at Camberwell, University of the Arts London.

Hale Fulya Çelikel has been working at Sabancı University for over a decade and teaches courses on classical music history, opera and twentieth-century music history, encompassing popular music. Simultaneously, she has a popular music career as a metal keyboardist, singer and synthesiser artist, having worked in the audio sector as a product manager for SynthMaster since 2018.

Owen Coggins is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in Social and Political Sciences at Brunel University London, investigating ambiguity, ideology and marginal religion in black metal music cultures. His book Mysticism, Ritual and Religion in Drone Metal (Bloomsbury Academic 2018) won the 2019 IASPM Book Prize, and writing on noise, extreme music and religion have appeared in publications such as Metal Music Studies, Popular Music and Riffs. Coggins is also working on a co-authored book about the folk instruments in global metal music, and runs drone record label Oaken Palace as a registered charity raising money for environmental causes.

Andrew L. Cope is a freelance musicologist, educator and performer of rock and metal music. A protégé of the late Professor Sheila Whiteley, and PhD graduate of the University of Salford UK, Cope is best known as the author of Black Sabbath and the Rise of Heavy Metal Music (Ashgate 2010) and the award-winning Status Quo: Mighty Innovators of Rock (Routledge 2019). Cope has also taken part in a range of film, radio and podcast interviews to offer his erudite insight into the world of rock and metal music.

Ross Hagen is Associate Professor of Music Studies at Utah Valley University in Orem, UT, USA. Hagen’s research interests include underground music scenes, black metal music, medievalism and avant-garde music. He has published articles and reviews in a number of academic journals, edited volumes and encyclopaedias and is a regular presenter at international conferences. Recent publications include co-editing Medievalism and Metal Music Studies: Throwing Down the Gauntlet (2019), chapters in The Oxford Handbook of Music and Medievalism (2020) and Researching Subcultures, Myth, and Memory (2020) and a book on Darkthrone’s 1992 album A Blaze in the Northern Sky for Bloomsbury’s 33.3 book series (2020). In addition to his academic work, Hagen has long been active as a performer and composer, specialising in black metal and other extreme and/or marginal music styles.

Pierre Hecker is Senior Researcher and Lecturer at the Centre for Near and Middle Eastern Studies at Philipps-University of Marburg, Germany. He holds a PhD from Leipzig University and is the author of the book Turkish Metal: Music, Meaning, and Morality in a Muslim Society (Ashgate, 2012). Recent publications include ‘Islam: The Meaning of Style’ (Sociology of Islam, 2018), ‘Satan, Sex and an Islamist Zombie Apocalypse’ (UCL Press, 2022) and ‘Tired of Religion: Atheism and Nonbelief in “New Turkey”’ (2022). He heads the research group ‘Atheism and the Politics of Culture in Contemporary Turkey’ funded by Stiftung Mercator and co-edited the volume The Politics of Culture in Contemporary Turkey (Edinburgh University Press, 2022).

Imke von Helden holds a PhD in Scandinavian Studies and has written about cultural identity, history and mythology in Norwegian metal music. She is the manager of an academic institution at the University of Koblenz, Germany, and a vocalist of the all-female metal project Chaos Rising.

Jan-Peter Herbst is Reader in Music Production at the University of Huddersfield (UK) where he is Director of the Research Centre for Music, Culture and Identity (CMCI). His primary research area is popular music culture, in particular rock music and the electric guitar, on which he has published widely. Currently, he is undertaking two funded research projects on metal: one that explores how heaviness is created and controlled in metal music production, and one investigating extreme metal vocals. Herbst’s editorial roles include IASPM Journal and Metal Music Studies.

Rosemary Lucy Hill is Senior Lecturer in Media and Popular Culture at University of Huddersfield, where she is the Director of the Popular Music Studies Research Group. She is the author of Gender, Metal and the Media: Women Fans and the Gendered Experience of Music (Palgrave) and has published widely on issues around gender, popular music and digital spaces. She co-created the Five Step Guide to Writing a Safer Spaces Policy (www.saferspaces.org.uk) for music venues to improve safety at live music events. She is also the co-editor of Intellect’s Advances in Metal Music Studies book series. She is currently investigating sexual violence in the music industry.

Catherine Hoad is Senior Lecturer in Te Rewa o Puanga/School of Music and Creative Media Production, at Te Kunenga Ki Pūrehuroa/Massey University, Aotearoa/New Zealand, and Chair of the Australia-New Zealand branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music. Her research explores constructions of identity and belonging in heavy metal and hardcore scenes, practices and communities.

Lewis F. Kennedy is a musicologist and Curriculum Manager (Popular Music) at Leeds Conservatoire. In 2018, he completed a PhD in Music at the University of Hull writing a thesis on functions of genre in metal and hardcore music, conceptualising genre as an active, emerging and determining force in the production and consumption of contemporary popular music. Having been involved in metal studies for several years, he is the current Treasurer and Membership Officer of the International Society for Metal Music Studies. He has co-edited the ‘Metal & Musicology’ special issue of Metal Music Studies (2019). Recent publications include book chapters on New Wave of American Heavy Metal and notions of heritage(-making) in metal/hardcore historiography, a study of the interplay between aidoru and metal themes in the lyrics of Babymetal, and an ethnography of the Hull metal/hardcore scene.

Mark Marrington is currently Associate Professor in Music Production at York St John University, having previously held teaching positions at Leeds College of Music and the University of Leeds (School of Electronic and Electrical Engineering). His research interests include metal music composition and production, music technology and creativity, the contemporary classical guitar and twentieth-century British classical music. Marrington has published chapters with Cambridge University Press, Bloomsbury Academic, Routledge and Future Technology Press, and has contributed articles to journals Metal Music Studies, British Music, Soundboard, the Musical Times and the Journal on the Art of Record Production. His recently published monograph, Recording the Classical Guitar (2021), won the 2022 ARSC Award for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research (Classical Music).

Mark Mynett, as well as Senior Lecturer in Music Technology and Production at the University of Huddersfield (UK), is a live music engineer, and record producer, engineer, mix and mastering engineer with his own studio – Mynetaur Productions. He has had an extensive career as professional musician with six worldwide commercial album releases with his band Kill II This, along the way working with renowned producers Colin Richardson and Andy Sneap and several years of high-profile touring in Europe.

Daniel Nevárez Araújo is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Puerto Rico – Río Piedras. He has published work in a wide array of topics, including Disability Studies, AIDS/HIV literature and film, comedy, documentary film, immigration, identity, and heavy metal music in publications such as The Journal of Fandom Studies, The Massachusetts Review, Trespassing Journal, Sargasso, and Metal Music Studies. He has co-edited the books Heavy Metal in Argentina: In Black We Are Seen (2020), Heavy Metal in Latin America: Perspectives from the Distorted South (2021), and Defiant Sounds: Heavy Metal Music in the Global South (2022).

Peter Pichler is Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Graz, where he leads the research project ‘Breaking the law?! Norm-Related Sonic Knowledge in Heavy Metal Culture. Graz and Styria since 1980’. His fields of expertise are European Union cultural history, metal music studies and historical theory. His latest book is Metal Music, Sonic Knowledge, and the Cultural Ear in Europe since 1970: A Historiographic Exploration (2020).

Paula Rowe is a social work scholar at the University of South Australia. Her research focus is on community building and belonging, and the political activation of marginalised groups and individuals, most often through a critical youth studies lens. Rowe is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board for Metal Music Studies. She has occupied numerous roles in the metal music industry over three decades, and her current metal research is investigating the youth uptake of decolonial metal.

Eric Smialek researches musical meaning through music analysis and reception studies. His most recent article, on Taylor Swift and LGBTQ allyship, appears in Contemporary Music Review. A frequent contributor to edited collections, Smialek has forthcoming publications in Heavy Metal Music and Dis/Ability; Music and Genre: New Directions; The Routledge Handbook of Metal Music Composition; and The Routledge Handbook of Progressive Rock, Metal, and the Literary Imagination. He serves on the editorial advisory board for the journal Metal Music Studies and is an assistant editor for IASPM Journal. Smialek is currently Senior Research Fellow at the University of Huddersfield to research musical expression, technique and cultural meaning in extreme metal vocals.

Karl Spracklen is Professor of Sociology of Leisure and Culture at Leeds Beckett University. He has written extensively about belonging and exclusion in leisure spaces, leisure theory and subcultures of music. He was one of the founding editors of Metal Music Studies and is the Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of the Sociology of Leisure.

Daniel Suer studied music education and English at the University of Siegen and musicology at the University of Music and Dance Cologne. Currently, he is a research assistant and PhD student at the University of Siegen (Germany) within a DFG-funded project on the relation between music and dance in metal. His research interests focus on music–movement–corporeality, metal studies, qualitative research methods and x-disciplinarity in popular music studies.

Jeremy Swist is Lecturer in the Department of Classical Studies at Brandeis University in his home state of Massachusetts. He holds a PhD in Classics from the University of Iowa. He has published on rhetoric, historiography, philosophy and medicine under the Roman Empire, with a special interest in the emperor Julian the Apostate. His publications in metal studies include “Satan’s Empire: Ancient Rome’s anti-Christian appeal in extreme metal” in Metal Music Studies (2019) and “Headbanging to Byzantium: The Reception of the Byzantine Empire in Heavy Metal Music” in What Byzantinism Is This Is Istanbul? (ed. E. Alışık, 2021). He has devoted multiple invited lectures and public pieces to addressing appropriations of Greco-Roman antiquity, especially Sparta, by far-right metal bands. In 2022, he and Charlotte Naylor Davis co-organised the first Heavy Metal & Global Premodernity conference.

Niall Thomas is Senior Lecturer in music production at the University of Winchester (United Kingdom). His research explores the phenomenology of record production in a number of contexts, most recently in metal music. Thomas is also interested in the use of music technology for inclusive practice in higher education.

Sam Vallen is the lead guitarist and musical director of Australian progressive metal band Caligula’s Horse, as well as a producer, songwriter and music academic. He holds a doctorate in music from the Queensland Conservatorium.

Nelson Varas-Díaz is Professor of Social-community Psychology at Florida International University. His work related to metal music addresses issues of community formation, linkages between culture and music and metal music as a decolonial strategy in Latin America. He co-edited the books Heavy Metal Music and the Communal Experience (2016), Heavy Metal in Argentina: In Black We Are Seen (2020) and Heavy Metal in Latin America: Perspectives from the Distorted South (2021). He authored the book Decolonial Metal Music in Latin America (2021) published by Intellect. He has produced and directed the award-winning documentaries Songs of Injustice: Heavy Metal Music in Latin America and Acts of Resistance: Heavy Metal Music in Latin America. He is one of the editors of the Metal Music Studies journal.

Jeremy Wallach is Professor in the Department of Popular Culture in the School of Cultural and Critical Studies at Bowling Green State University. A cultural anthropologist specializing in popular music and globalisation, he has written or co-written more than thirty research articles; co-edited, with Esther Clinton, a special issue of Asian Music (2013); and authored the monograph Modern Noise, Fluid Genres: Popular Music in Indonesia, 1997–2001 (Univ. of Wisconsin, 2008; Indonesian Ed., Komunitas Bambu, 2017). In 2011, he co-edited, with Harris M. Berger and Paul D. Greene, the collection Metal Rules the Globe: Heavy Metal Music around the World (Duke University Press). Wallach has given research presentations in Austria, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Indonesia, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, the Philippines, Puerto Rico and throughout the United States.

Duncan Williams is Lecturer in Acoustics and Audio Engineering at the University of Salford, Manchester, UK, where he is also Course Leader of the Sound Engineering and Production BSc(Hons) degrees. His recent published work includes library music for EMI Production Music, SonyATV, DeWolfe and KPM MusicHouse, with several major television credits. Contemporary music performances include concerts at the Royal College of Music, London (2015), International Computer Music Conference (2014), installations at Los Angeles’ UCLA Art|Sci Gallery (2014), the Peninsula Arts Contemporary Music Festival in Devon (2013–14), New Scientist Live (2022), British Science Festival (2018), Berlin Science Festival (2018), South by Southwest (2019), Silbersalz (2019), the Science and Media Museum (2021) and the Museum of Science and Industry (2021).