ADA PALMER is an internationally acclaimed science fiction and fantasy novelist, historian, and composer, best known for her award-winning Terra Ignota series, beginning with Too Like the Lightning (2016). She attended Simon's Rock and Bryn Mawr colleges, and completed her PhD at Harvard focusing on the Renaissance, radical thought, atomism, and the reception of the classics. Her current research focuses on the history of censorship and the motives which make people support it.
She teaches history at the University of Chicago, running her (in) famous papal election simulation and a study abroad program in Florence, and works with the Renaissance Studies Program, the Office of Research and Teaching Innovations, the Institute on the Formation of Knowledge, and the Parrhesia Program for Public Discourse. She blogs and podcasts at ExUrbe.com, studies and consults for the anime and manga industry, especially on feminist and postwar manga and Osamu Tezuka, and composes close harmony a cappella music with science fiction and mythological themes notably her Norse mythological song cycle Sundown : Whispers of Ragnarok—which she performs with the group Sassafrass.
She is disabled (chronic illness, chronic pain), and is a disability and free speech activist. Her video seminar project "Censorship and Information Revolutions from the Inquisition to the Internet," co-run with Adrian Johns and Cory Doctorow, can be watched in full online at voices.uchicago.edu/censorship. Many seeds of this book originated on her blog ExUrbe.com, or in essays now collected in Trace Elements : Conversations on the Project of Science Fiction and Fantasy, co-authored with Jo Walton, with whom she co-runs the podcast Ex UrbeAdAstra.
She teaches history at the University of Chicago, running her (in) famous papal election simulation and a study abroad program in Florence, and works with the Renaissance Studies Program, the Office of Research and Teaching Innovations, the Institute on the Formation of Knowledge, and the Parrhesia Program for Public Discourse. She blogs and podcasts at ExUrbe.com, studies and consults for the anime and manga industry, especially on feminist and postwar manga and Osamu Tezuka, and composes close harmony a cappella music with science fiction and mythological themes notably her Norse mythological song cycle Sundown : Whispers of Ragnarok—which she performs with the group Sassafrass.
She is disabled (chronic illness, chronic pain), and is a disability and free speech activist. Her video seminar project "Censorship and Information Revolutions from the Inquisition to the Internet," co-run with Adrian Johns and Cory Doctorow, can be watched in full online at voices.uchicago.edu/censorship. Many seeds of this book originated on her blog ExUrbe.com, or in essays now collected in Trace Elements : Conversations on the Project of Science Fiction and Fantasy, co-authored with Jo Walton, with whom she co-runs the podcast Ex UrbeAdAstra.
