Nancy Ellen Abrams

Nancy Ellen Abrams has a B.A. from the University of Chicago in the history and philosophy of science and a law degree from the University of Michigan.  She is the co-author, with Joel R. Primack, of The View from the Center of the Universe: Discovering our Extraordinary Place in the Cosmos (Riverhead, 2006) and The New Universe and the Human Future: How a Shared Cosmology Could Transform the World  (Yale University Press, 2011).  She works as a scholar to put the discoveries of modern cosmology into a cultural context and as a writer and artist to communicate their possible meanings at a deeper level.  

She has a long-term interest in the role of science in shaping a new politics and has worked in this area for a European environmental think tank in Rome, the Ford Foundation, and the Office of Technology Assessment of the U.S. Congress. Her more political writing has appeared in journals, newspapers, and magazines, such as The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Environment, California Lawyer, and Science and Global Security.  "Cosmology and Culture" is a course that she and Primack developed and have co-taught for many years at the University of California, Santa Cruz; it has received awards from both the Templeton Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies.  

She and Primack have also co-written articles that have appeared in books and magazines including Science, Astronomy Now, Philosophy in Science, Science & Spirit, Spirituality and Health, and Tikkun.   Abrams and Primack gave the Terry Lectures at Yale in October 2009 on “Cosmic Society: the New Universe and the Human Future,” and their 2011 book is based on those lectures.