Michael Billig. Professor of social sciences at Loughborough University since 1985, and a member of the influential Discourse and Rhetoric Group (along with the likes of Derek Edwards and Jonathan Potter), his preferred field of study is Social Psychology. Billig trained in Bristol under Henri Tajfel as an experimental psychologist, and helped design the Minimal Group experiments that founded the so-called "social identity" perspective.

Years later, he abandoned experimental work to consider issues such as power from a sociological perspective, political extremism, and ideology, dealing with them in a major series of books. In Social Psychology and Intergroup Relations (1976) he offered a critique of the orthodox treatment of prejudice in the field of psychology. In Fascists (1979) he helped reveal the ideology of anti-Semitism and classical fascism underlying the British group called the National Front, at a time when it was gaining some political legitimacy and electoral gains. In the eighties he focused on everyday thought and the relationship between ideology and common sense.