Speaker Biographies

Everything, Everywhere, All at Once

Biography:
Itziar Azkona, DFAstroS, studied Sociology and Politics and she got an MSc at University of Surrey in Social Research Methods. Since 2000, she has walked a path to deeply study and practice astrology that has led her to become a Tutor at the Faculty of Astrological Studies. She is currently preparing her PhD at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David.

Name: Nick Campion

Confessionalisation and the Great Comet of 1618

2nd lecture: The Awe and Wonder of the Sky: Experiencing the Above Below

Biography:
Nicholas Campion is Associate Professor in Cosmology and Culture, Principal Lecturer in the Institute of Education and Humanities and Director of the Sophia Centre for the Study of Cosmology in Culture and Director of the Harmony Institute, at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, the only academic centre in the world to consider humanity’s relationship with the sky. He is Programme Director of the University’s MAs in Cultural Astronomy and Astrology, and Ecology and Spirituality. His books include the two-volume History of Western Astrology (London: Bloomsbury 2008/9) and Astrology and Cosmology in the World’s Religions (New York: New York University Press, 2012). He is the editor of Culture and Cosmos, the journal on the history of cultural astronomy and astrology.

Name: Wade Caves

Finding Fortuna: a technical mirroring of the mind

Biography:
Wade Caves, based in Brooklyn, NY, is an astrological consultant and educator specializing in horary, elections, mundane, and classical astrological technique. He now serves as faculty at the STA and as principal of the Astronomy for Astrologers program. Wade publishes his work on world astrology through Skyscript's In Mundo publishing desk and hosts the World Astrology Summit, a conference dedicated to the advancement of mundane technique for diverse audiences. He is the editor and annotator of the 300th anniversary edition of William Lilly's History of His Life and Times (Rubedo Press, 2015).

Name: Dawn Collins, Margaux Crump and Jake Eshelman

Water Moves: Exploring the Sky, Geography, and Deep Ecology of Sacred Springs in Wales

Biography:
Dawn H. Collins is a tutor at The Sophia Centre, contributing both to the Ecology and Spirituality and the Cultural Astronomy and Astrology MA programmes at the University of Wales, Trinity Saint David. She is also a Research Fellow of the Foro di Studi Avanzati Gaetano Massa (FSA), Rome, Italy (Gaetano Massa Research Institute for Advanced Study of the Humanities). Her research explores spirited landscapes and ritual healing in Tibetan cultural regions through ethnographic research inspired by her practice as a dance artist and as a practitioner of massage therapies from Thailand and Japan.

Margaux Crump is an interdisciplinary artist exploring the entanglements between ecology, folklore, and magic. She is currently investigating the phenomena of the unseen, from the microscopic to the mythic worlds that surround us. Her sculpture, photography, and ritual work has been exhibited extensively across the United States, most notably at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Saint Louis, MO; Women and Their Work, Austin, TX, DiverseWorks, Houston, TX, and Olfactory Art Keller, New York, NY. She is a recent recipient of the Stone & DeGuire Contemporary Art Award. Margaux holds a MFA in studio art from Washington University in St. Louis.

Jake Eshelman is an artist and visual researcher exploring the complex relationships between humans, our environment, and everyone we share it with. His work has been exhibited internationally, most notably at Vantaa Art Museum Artsi in Helsinki, Finland; Contemporary Calgary in Alberta, Canada; Houston Center for Photography in Houston, TX; and The Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities at Cambridge University, UK; among others. His photographs are in the permanent collections at Harvard University and have also been published in National Geographic. Jake is currently pursuing his MA in Ecology & Spirituality from The University of Wales, Trinity Saint David.

Name: George Coutts

What’s Natural: A Considered Reading of Ptolemy’s On the Diseases of the Soul

Biography:
George is an astrological researcher from Toronto. He holds an MA in Cultural Astronomy and Astrology, and is in hot pursuit of a PhD in Anthropology under the tutelage of the Sophia Centre. His current research is an expression of his yearning to understand how astrologers have handled (and persist to contribute to) conversations about sex and sexuality, and the part astrology plays in those conversations more broadly.

Name: Dorian Gieseler Greenbaum

‘As thou daily conversest with the heavens, so instruct and form thy minde according to the image of Divinity’: Lilly's Remark and the Divinatory Mode in Astrology

Biography:
Dorian Gieseler Greenbaum is a Tutor at the University of Wales Trinity St David. She writes on topics in the history of astrology, divination and medicine. Author of The Daimon in Hellenistic Astrology: Origins and Influence (Brill 2016), her recent piece, 'Abū Maʿshar and the Tradition of Planetary Lots in Astrology' appears in Mastering Nature in the Medieval Arabic and Latin Worlds: Studies in Heritage and Transfer of Arabic Science in Honour of Charles Burnett (Brepols 2023). Her book Peggy Webling and the Story behind Frankenstein: The Making of a Hollywood Monster (co-authored with Bruce Graver), appeared in April 2024 (Bloomsbury Academic).

Name: Ulla Koch

The Babylonian Diviner's Manual

Biography:
Ulla Koch, Ph.D., is an Assyriologist from the University of Copenhagen. Her research interests are Mesopotamian divination, religion, and literature. She has published extensively on celestial divination and extispicy, inspection of the entrails of a sacrificial animal.

Name: Alejo Lopez

‘As above, so below’ in movies: exploring the cinematic sunset symbolism in films

Biography:
Alejo López holds a degree in performing arts and another in psychology. He is currently training as a Jungian Analyst and has recently completed the MA in Cultural Astronomy and Astrology at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David where his dissertation won the MA in Cultural Astronomy and Astrology Dissertation Prize. Alejo has studied mythology, shamanism and Kabbalah, and is particularly interested in seeing how pop culture and current forms of art relate to psychological processes.

Name: Nicole Montag-Keller

In what ways does the ceiling in the Goetheanum exhibit the hermetic requirements of ‘As Above, So Below’ and in what ways would it fulfil the second part of the phrase ‘As Below, so Above’?

Biography:
Nicole Montag-Keller holds an MA in Cultural Astronomy and Astrology, (UWTSD) and a BSc (hons) in Psychology (The OU). She worked in Education, Health Management, Business Administration, and Finance and has pursued in depth postgraduate studies in Education and Online Learning. Her interests lie in architecture and art, and how human beings relate towards unique building structures. She is also interested in teaching the intersections of culture, ethics, history and religion.

Name: John Murray

A Benedictine Science of the Stars – the Cosmology and Astrology of Hildegard of Bingen as Revealed in a Twelfth-Century Manuscript Fragment

Biography:
John Murray holds a PhD in the History and Philosophy of Science and Education and an MScEd specialising in curriculum architecture in medicine, the natural sciences, and maths. John is an Assistant Professor of Research in the Department of Family Medicine in the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of Manitoba in Canada, where he resides. His current interests are in the history of medicine, Medieval medical astrology, and their associations with lyric poetry, ecclesiastical scholasticism and fabula. A student in the MA in Cultural Astronomy and Astrology at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, his dissertation focused on the cosmology, astrology, and melosthesia of the twelfth-century mystic, polymath, poet, composer and Benedictine magistra, Saint Hildegard von Bingen. The foundations of the study were two-fold: a) his complete translation and commentary on the enigmatic manuscript known as the Fragmente Thuringiæ Revelationes, MS Lat. Qu. 674 and; b) the cosmological and astrological allegory De duodecim signis et planetis (Regarding the Twelve Signs and the Planets) in Hildegard’s treatise on diseases and treatments, the Causæ et Curæ. John’s artistic interests include his activities as a heavy-metal electronic cellist and basso/baritone in the Royal Winnipeg Philharmonic.

Name: Izabela Podlaska-Konkel

The Horoscope as an Image of the Sky in the Practice of the Hellenistic Astrologers

Biography:
Izabela Podlaska-Konkel holds an MA in Cultural Astronomy and Astrology from the University of Wales Trinity Saint David (2023) and an MA in Polish Studies from the University of Warsaw (1998). She is a student at the Institute of Classical Philology and Cultural Studies at the Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski University in Warsaw where she is writing a BA thesis on the description of the heavens and the fixed stars in the Mathesis of Firmicus Maternus in relation to the earlier literary tradition. Her main interest is the intersection of astrology and culture in ancient and pre-modern times.

Name: Luis Ribeiro

A Science of Correlations: connecting the celestial and the earthly

Biography:
Luís Campos Ribeiro (University of Lisbon) is an historian of science and art. He has a PhD on the History and Philosophy of Sciences by the University of Lisbon published by Brill with the title Jesuit Astrology: Prognostication and Science in Early Modern Culture (2023). His research focuses the history of astrology, astronomy and medicine as well as scientific illustration (Medieval and Early Modern). He is currently a researcher at CIUHCT, University of Lisbon, heads the Astra Project: Historical research on astrological techniques and practices, and is a postdoc researcher at the ERC Rutter Project.

Name: Fabio Silva

Heaven and Earth are not Two, or how to make a case for celestial alignments

Biography:
Fabio Silva is a Senior Lecturer in Archaeological Modelling at Bournemouth University and co-founder and co-editor of the Journal of Skyscape Archaeology. His primary research interest is how societies have perceived and conceived their environment and used that to time and adjust social, productive and magico-religious behaviours. This steered him to focus research along two distinct yet complementary strands: archaeological modelling and skyscape archaeology. With respect to the latter, he is not so interested in identifying and collecting celestial alignments but in understanding how they can help us peek into the ontologies of past societies, i.e. into how they conceived the world and their place in it. This takes careful, robust and reflexive approaches to the archaeological record – both qualitative and quantitative – which he is keen to not only explore but also develop. This has taken him to study primarily prehistoric structures in Iberia and the United Kingdom.

Name: Anupam Suman

“Fate (Daiva) from above, Freewill (Puruṣakāra) from below” : Decoding the Philosophical Compatibilism of Indian Jyotiḥśāstra with Varāhamihirian Texts

Biography:
Anupam Kumar Suman is studying MPhil in Classical Indian Religion at the University of Oxford. His MPhil research is based on the theory of Karma and its philosophical application in Indian astrology. Anupam is starting DPhil on an astrological topic at Oxford from 2024. Before this, he completed his MA in Cultural Astronomy and Astrology from University of Wales Trinity Saint David in 2022. His primary research was based on the discourse of fate and freewill and its application in Nāḍī palm-leaf astrology. Anupam has also completed MA in Social Policy from The London School of Economics and Political Science. Professionally he was a Senior Civil Servant in India for 15 years and currently he is also the General Secretary of a political party in India.

Name: Graeme Tobyn

Culpeper our English Paracelsus?

Biography:
Graeme Tobyn is a senior lecturer in the School of Health, Social Work and Sports at the University of Central Lancashire with a PhD in history from Lancaster University. Having practised as a herbalist for 26 years, he now focuses on teaching and researching. Nicholas Culpeper’s astrological herbal practice has been a focus for many years: He published Culpeper’s Medicine in 1997 and The Western Herbal Tradition with UCLan herbal colleagues in 2011, while more recently writing a book chapter and an article on aspects of Culpeper’s astrology.