Ada Palmer

Historian and novelist Ada Palmer studies progress, censorship, atheism & radical thought, and teaches at the University of Chicago. Her new book Inventing the Renaissance: Myths of a Golden Age is a playful and irreverent look at the propaganda behind the myth of a bad Middle Ages & golden Renaissance, a story partly about the days of Machiavelli and the Medici, but equally about later centuries’ projects to repurpose the myth for their own ends. Her internationally award-winning science fiction novel series Terra Ignota (vol 1 Too Like the Lightning) depicts a twenty-fifth century in which mystery and corruption shake the globalized successors to the nation-state.