Dark Skies

Dark Skies addresses a significant gap in knowledge in relation to perspectives from the arts, humanities and social sciences. In providing a new multi- and interdisciplinary field of inquiry, this book brings together engagements with dark skies from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds.

Nick Dunn is Professor of Urban Design and Executive Director of Imagination, the design and architecture research lab at Lancaster University, UK. He is founding Director of the Dark Design Lab, exploring the impacts of nocturnal activity on humans and non-humans. Nick is a Director of DarkSky UK, promoting more sustainable relationships between the built environment and the night, as well as exploring ways to promote wider and inclusive participation with dark skies. He is the author of Dark Matters: A Manifesto for the Nocturnal City (2016) and co-editor of Rethinking Darkness: Cultures, Histories, Practices (2020). Nick is a keen nightwalker, has curated exhibitions, and given invited talks at both literature and science festivals.
Tim Edensor is Professor of Social and Cultural Geography at the Institute of Place Management, Manchester Metropolitan University. He is the author of Tourists at the Taj (1998), National Identity, Popular Culture and Everyday Life (2002), Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics and Materiality (2005), From Light to Dark: Daylight, Illumination and Gloom (2017) and Stone: Stories of Urban Materiality (2020). He is the editor of Geographies of Rhythm (2010), and co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Place (2020), Rethinking Darkness: Cultures, Histories, Practices (2020) and Weather: Spaces, Mobilities and Affects (2020). His most recent book, about a Scottish medieval cross, is Landscape, Materiality and Heritage: An Object Biography (2022).