This book addresses supergravity and supergravity-motivated effective field theories in the context of cosmological model building. Extracting information about quintessence from string theory has attracted much attention in the past few years.  The question became more urgent very recently after the possibility of obtaining de Sitter space was called into question. Therefore, there is an interesting debate as to whether de Sitter space or, even, quintessence can be derived from a fundamental theory, string theory or otherwise. This is a very active field of research, and the topics covered...