Ada Palmer

The daughter of computer engineer Douglas Palmer and artist Laura Higgins Palmer, Ada was born in Washington, D.C. but grew up in Annapolis, Maryland, where she attended Key School.^[1] She began her undergraduate education at age 15 for two years at Bard College at Simon's Rock, and then transferred to Bryn Mawr College, where she received a Bachelor of Art in history in 2001.^[4] She then obtained an M.A. and a Ph.D. in history at Harvard University in 2003 and 2009.^[4][5][6][7]

Following a stint at Texas A&M University from 2009 to 2014, Palmer began teaching at the University of Chicago.^[4][5] She was an assistant professor at the University of Chicago from 2014 to 2018, and has been an associate professor since 2018.^[4]

As a scholar, Palmer researches and teaches about the Renaissance. She teaches a class on the Italian Renaissance, "The Italian Renaissance: Dante, Machiavelli, and the Wars of Popes and Kings", known by the students as "pope class" or "pope LARP".^[8] In the class, students reenact the 1492 papal conclave, complete with secret meetings, betrayals, and a final vote conducted in full costume.^[9] In an interview, Palmer discussed her experience with the class, suggesting that students have a lot of favorable biases about this period despite its darker underside.^[10] She received the Quantrell Award in 2021.^[11]

Palmer co-authored The Recovery of Ancient Philosophy in the Renaissance: A Brief Guide with James Hankins in 2008. Her own first book, Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance, was published in 2014. Palmer holds that the Lucretius poem De rerum natura, rediscovered in the Renaissance, could be the first document offering a profane worldview; that is, a worldview in which the universe works without any divine influence. This theory has implications for the development of political science as well as other secular worldviews. Palmer and Hankins also argue that Lucretius's ideas directly influenced Niccolò Machiavelli and utilitarianism, because of the ways in which his theories helped them create an ethics working per se, without any external, godly influence.^[12]

Palmer also wrote a book about the Renaissance for general readers, Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age, published in 2025. It has been described as a work of historiography rather than history, telling not just the history of the Renaissance period, but how "the idea of a Renaissance, a rebirth out of a "dark age" into a "golden age" – has been used, abused, created and demolished, for centuries and centuries, including during the centuries when the Renaissance was actually underway".^[13] It was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Related Work in 2026.^[14]

Palmer's first novel, Too Like the Lightning, the first of the Terra Ignota series, was published in 2016, and was a finalist for the 2017 Hugo Awards.^[3] It has been described as a rational adjacent book,^[15] a work influenced both by science-fiction and historical genres,^[16] a fact the author has confirmed.^[17] The novel won the 2017 Compton Crook Award for the best first novel in the genre published during the previous year.^[18] Three more novels followed.

Palmer has announced multiple upcoming projects, including the Hearthfire Saga, a new historical fiction series about Viking mythology,^[19] with the first book Fire in the Dark scheduled to be published in July 2027.^[4]

Palmer was diagnosed with Crohn's disease and polycystic ovary syndrome in 2004, and is a disability activist with a particular focus on self-care and invisible disabilities.^[20][21]

Palmer also composes music, including an album centered around a retelling of Norse myths^[22], as part of the group Sassafrass.^[23]