Nicholas Campion

I read history at Queens' College, Cambridge (BA History (1974), followed by a MA in South East Asian Studies - history, politics and international relations (SOAS 1976); My PhD dissertation in 2004 was a study of the extent and nature of contemporary belief in astrology. I am Director of the Sophia Centre for the Study of Cosmology in Culture at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David and programme director of the University's MA in Cultural Astronomy and Astrology. I am editorial director the Sophia Centre Press, a spin-out company from the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, and editor of the journal, Culture and Cosmos. My core research interests are utopianism and millenialism in particular, and the relationships between cosmology, astronomy, astrology and culture in general. I am interested in the way in which people construct stories about the world. My recent books include the two-volume History of Western Astrology (London: Bloomsbury 2010), Astrology and Cosmology in the World’s Religions (New York: New York University Press 2012) Astrology and Popular Religion in the Modern West (London: Routledge 2015),and The New Age in the Modern West: Counter-Culture, Utopia and Prophecy from the late Eighteenth Century to the Present Day (London: Bloomsbury 2015). Recent papers include 2015: ‘The Moral Philosophy of Space Travel: A Historical Review’, in Jai Galliot (ed.), Commercial Space Exploration: Ethics, Policy, Governance (Abingdon: Ashgate), pp. 9-22. Together with Richard Dunn (Royal Greenwich Observatory) I am general editor of Bloomsbury's forthcoming six-volume Cultural History of the Universe.