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Ada Palmer

Associate Professor of History, University Of Chicago

Search every verified Ada Palmer interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Ada Palmer, Associate Professor of History at the University of Chicago, has recently appeared on several podcasts and given a talk discussing historical parallels between the Renaissance and contemporary issues. In October 2026, she joined the podcast "Beforecast" with Adam Davidson for multiple episodes focused on Machiavelli, where she discussed his introduction of consequentialist ethics and argued that *The Prince* was written for Machiavelli's own government and close associates rather than for public circulation. She also appeared on the "Dogs Shirt Daily" podcast to discuss a newly uncovered Hittite archive and the decline of medieval Italian merchant republics, drawing connections between historical political theology and current American political discourse. In a talk titled "The Ongoing Information Revolution, or Don't Panic," Palmer argued that contemporary anxiety over generative AI echoes the crisis sparked by the printing press in the 1500s, noting that the world "ended" in 1551 according to some contemporaries. She stated that societies lack good models between fully replacing or rejecting new technologies, and cited historical examples to suggest that policy decisions, not technological trends alone, determine outcomes. Palmer also discussed her book *Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age* on the "Foreign Exchanges" podcast, where she described the difficulty of overcoming entrenched historical narratives about golden ages and dark ages, and emphasized that large systemic changes are multi-generational.

Recent appearances

Verified interview transcripts

Notable quotes

“The two biggest differences, one is scale. This is why people reach to Rome as opposed to to Chinese tiny city republics because we're looking at city republics with a population of 100,000 or 50,000. Where obviously social dynamics operate differently, but where the scale of wealth is staggering. So that's very different from the modern US. And the other thing that's very different from the modern US and also from t”

“When we talk callously about deliberately causing a brief dark age so that it'll make a golden age, imagining somehow that this is happening on the level of electoral politics within years or even within a one lifetime is an absurdity. Big large systemic changes are multi-generational. And our thinking needs to be multi-generational for it to understand what history is. So, I quote that letter that Machiavelli got in”

“Policy and empathy are everything. Will post-pandemic post-GenAI labor be empowered or disempowered? Will wealth gaps grow or diminish? It would be easy and kind of relaxing if the answer was that the trends are always the same. But historical reality demonstrates that policy determines all. After the Black Death, workers gained power in some places, and in others policy stripped workers of power and rights, even of ”

“The ends justify the means when the end is the survival of the people. And so in the same way that our law code says you can do things in self-defense that you can't do when it's not in self-defense, right? If someone breaks into my home and I have a gun, you suddenly have rights that you do not have at other times. And so in Machiavelli's view, the end is the survival of this people so that they are not destroyed by”

“We often talk about censorship as if the natural state of humankind is absolute free speech, and by nature we are living in a state of free speech; unless some aberrations, some laws, some nastiness, appears and creates an apparatus of censorship. And if we remove that apparatus of censorship, then we will return to our natural, pure liberty. That way of thinking about it, which is an 18th century way of thinking abo”

“To be a scientist is to publish your results and share them with a community of other scientists so that they can test them, so that the whole human civilization progresses a little bit. When my friends who are chemists or my friends who are particle physicists discover something, the next goal is to share that discovery with everyone so everyone's knowledge advances. What does Leonardo do? He writes everything he di”

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