About me:
Thomas Moynihan is a historian of ideas & writer. He holds a DPhil from Oriel College, Oxford, and is currently a Research Affiliate at Cambridge University’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, as well as an Berggruen Fellow at the Berggruen Institute, and an Affiliate Researcher at the Antikythera think-tank. His writing and work has appeared in publications like BBC Future, The New Scientist, The Guardian, Aeon, Noema Magazine, The Independent, MIT Press Reader, Vice, Tank Magazine, and The Daily Mail.
Thomas studies how worldviews transform over time, in often radical ways, as more is learnt and revealed about the cosmos and our placement within it. In particular, he is interested in how accumulating insights about the external universe have, again and again, reorganised our sense of the biggest picture priorities, potentials, and perils facing our species.
Aside from regularly keynoting at institutions ranging from Stanford University to MIT Media Lab to Hong Kong’s Tai Kwun Contemporary, Thomas has been featured on shows and podcasts including BBC Radio 4, CBC Radio, 80,000 Hours, and The Atlantic, and his writing and work has appeared in publications like BBC Future, The New Scientist, The Guardian, Aeon, Noema Magazine, The Independent, MIT Press Reader, Vice, Tank Magazine, and The Daily Mail.
Amongst other projects, Thomas is currently working on a book exploring how science discovered the deep future and proved that the present moment might be able to dictate its course. The project explores our species’s changing sense of orientation within not only time, but also relative to all the ways things — in the broadest sense of the term — could have gone otherwise…
Thomas is represented by Max Edwards at Apple Tree Literary.