Ada Palmer is a cultural and intellectual historian examining radical thought and the recovery of the classics in early modern Europe, especially in the Italian Renaissance. She focuses on the history of science, religion, heresy, free thought, atheism, censorship, books, printing, and on patronage and the networks of power and money that enabled cultural creation in early modern Europe. She has written Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance (Harvard University Press, 2014) and the award-winning science fiction novel series Terra Ignota (beginning with Too Like the Lightning). Palmer is an Associate Professor in the Department of History, is co-founder of UChicago's new Renaissance Studies Program, and is affiliated with the Classics Department, the Gender Center, and the Institute on the Formation of Knowledge.