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James A. Palmer graduated from Michigan State University with a B.A. in history in 2000 and completed an M.A. in history at Duke University in 2002 before leaving academia to (among other things) do archaeological fieldwork, sling coffee, cook for a living, and then work as a fraud investigator before returning to school to earn his PhD in history from Washington University in St. Louis in 2015. He then taught for nearly a decade at Florida State University before coming to ������Ƶ���� in 2025.

He is the author of The Virtues of Economy: Governance, Power, and Piety in Late Medieval Rome (Cornell University Press, 2019) and The Chronicle of an Anonymous Roman: Rome, Italy, and Latin Christendom, c. 1325-1360 (Italica Press, 2021), as well as articles on ritual peacemaking, the historiography of late medieval Rome, peace movements in communal Italy, and the lived experience of Rome’s urban clergy as distinct from the clerical elite of the papal curia.

His current research interests fall largely into two areas.

The first, born largely out of dialog with students in the classroom, is interested in Italian involvement in the crusading movement, and ways that categories like “Italy” and “Italian” connoted in the Middle Ages, as well as how those connotations changed over the course of the crusading era.

The second is rooted in his translation work, a longstanding interest in the history of magic, and interest in contemporary concerns about the purpose of the liberal arts, and discourse about the current crises of truth. It examines intersections of the historiographical, the medical, and the magical in the chronicle of the Anonimo Romano.

As ever, he remains interested in just about everything, but especially in the medieval Mediterranean world, late medieval urban life and the ways it was shaped by the piety and politics of everyday people, and how their religious ideas inflected their societies and strategies.