Ada Palmer is a cultural and intellectual historian focusing on radical thought and the recovery of the classics in early modern Europe, especially in the Italian Renaissance. She teaches at the University of Chicago, and specializes in the history of science, religion, heresy, freethought, atheism, censorship, books, printing, and on patronage and the networks of power and money that enabled cultural creation in early modern Europe. Her series Terra Ignota is a philosophical science fiction tale of global politics in the year 2454, set in a hard-won utopia built on technologically generated abundance and borderless nations, and written in the style of an eighteenth-century philosophical novel like Candide.  She is also a composer, writes the philosophy and travel blog ExUrbe.com, and publishes on anime/manga, working as a consultant for several anime and manga publishers.