Speaker

Ada Palmer

Ada Palmer

Historian of the Renaissance at the University of Chicago, author of the Terra Ignota science fiction tetralogy (beginning with Too Like the Lightning, Hugo-nominated for Best Series in 2022), and composer of a Viking mythology song cycle. She also writes and composes music, studies anime and manga — particularly Osamu Tezuka and feminist manga — and blogs at exurbe.com.

Palmer’s historical work centres on the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, radical free thought, and the history of censorship. She is working on Inventing the Renaissance and a forthcoming novel drawing on the latest scholarship on Viking metaphysics. Her approach bridges the academic and the popular: she treats science fiction, biography, and public teaching as part of the same project of getting rigorous historiography into the wider cultural bloodstream.

Core positions

Palmer holds that censorship is better understood as an infrastructure problem than a content problem: once a suppression apparatus exists, it will be inherited by whoever next holds power, making the original rationale irrelevant. Her historical work on the Inquisition — which she insists was never a single unified body but a loose network of local authorities borrowing local prisons and police — supports a broader argument that centralised control over ideas is structurally weaker than it appears, and that the most effective censorship has always aimed at self-censorship rather than book destruction.

On contingency in history, Palmer argues that major outcomes are the products of small decisions by non-famous people — Voltaire’s father, Descartes’ publisher, the unnamed censors who were fresh-out-of-college literature graduates sympathetic to the ideas they were paid to suppress. Biography is the method she trusts most to recover this granularity, precisely because it cuts across the periodisation (Renaissance, Baroque, Enlightenment) that historians use and individuals lived straight through.

On gender, she follows Diderot: the performance of gender is almost entirely cultural construction, built over thousands of years of reinforced behaviour in language, clothing, and movement. Terra Ignota explores what survives that construction when the social scaffolding is removed.

In the wiki