Palmer

is Lecturer on the Modern West in the Study of Religion at Harvard. His current research interests include humanitarian engagement and national identity, cosmologies of the global market, the poetics of political satire, and the cultural construction of moral conscientiousness. His dissertation, which examined the efforts of Swedes to uphold egalitarian values and institutions in the face of an increasingly market-driven national and global order, won the 2001 Jepson Award for contributions to leadership studies. Palmer's ethnographic fieldwork has been supported by the American-Scandinavian Foundation, Council for European Studies, and Fulbright, Mellon, Sheldon, and Swedish Institute grants. His lecture courses include "Personal Choice and Global Transformation," "Ethnographic Imaginations," "The Making of Human Sacredness," and "Globalization and Human Values: Envisioning World Community." In 2002, Palmer won the Levenson Memorial Teaching Prize for best teaching by a junior faculty member.