A specialist in the interdisciplinary history of Russian technology, science, culture, and the arts, Prof. Palmer earned his B.A. in History and Slavic Languages & Literatures from the University of Kansas and his Ph.D. in History from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is author of Dictatorship of the Air: Aviation Culture and the Fate of Modern Russia (Cambridge University Press, 2006), co-editor of Science, Technology, Environment, and Medicine in Russia’s Great War and Revolution (Slavica Publishers, 2022) and How History is Made: A Student’s Guide to the Reading, Writing, and Thinking in the Discipline (Mavs Open Press, 2022), and editor of the forthcoming collection Flight Culture and the Human Experience (Texas A&M University Press, 2025). His current book-length project, How Russia was Made: Technology and Culture from the Icon to the iMac, examines the foreign origins and domestic transformation of major technological systems from the founding of the Kievan state through the opening decades of the twenty-first century. He is the founder, President and CEO of SPOKE Educational Network, Inc. (SPOKE-Network™) which serves as home to “Introduction to Russian Culture.”