Welcome to the home page of Ada Palmer. I am an historian, an author of science fiction and fantasy, and a composer. I teach in the History Department at the University of Chicago.
Here you will find information about my works and activities, samples of my writing and music, links to publications and blog pieces, my curriculum vitae, my forthcoming schedule of teaching, public presentations and concerts, and other useful information.
Paideia Institute Public Lectures – Recovering a Lost Classic in the Renaissance
The Paideia Institute is pleased to host a free public lecture on the process of recovering a lost classic in the Renaissance, examining how rare texts were acquired, multiplied, corrected, and distributed from 1350 into the many stages of the post-1450 print revolution (with live examples of Renaissance books to show), and also following the money, looking at new Renaissance ideas about the political utility of the classics which funded library-building and manuscript collection in an era when a single book could cost as much as a house.

An exhibition and video series at The University of Chicago
Why do people censor? For ambition? Religion? Profit? Power? Fear? This global history of attempts to control or silence information, from antiquity’s earliest written records to our new digital world, examines how censorship has worked, thrived, or failed in different times and places, and shows how real censorship movements tend to be very different from the centralized, methodical, top-down censorship depicted in Orwell’s 1984, which so dominates how we imagine censorship today. From indexes of forbidden books, to manuscripts with passages inked out by Church Inquisitors, to comics and pornography, to self-censorship and the subtle censorship of manipulating translations or teaching biased histories, the banned and challenged materials in this exhibit will challenge you to answer: how do you define what is and isn’t censorship?
Sections of the Project:
- Eight public Dialogues among the participants, October 5 through November 20, 2018.
- Videos of the public dialogues, available streaming online.
- Museum Exhibit “History of Censorship and Information Control from the Inquisition to the Internet” in the University of Chicago Special Collections Research Library, open September 17 through December 14, 2018.
- A printed catalog of the exhibit, and further publications to come.