Dr. Brian Palmer is a social anthropologist at Uppsala University in Sweden. Previously he held the Torgny Segerstedt Guest Professorship at Gothenburg University, and before that he taught at Harvard. There his courses on civic courage and engagement attracted as many as 600 students per term, and in 2002 Mr. Palmer was awarded the Levenson Prize as Harvard’s best lecturer.
The book Global Values 101 is based on Brian’s Harvard courses. His doctoral dissertation, also at Harvard, explored Swedish conceptions of solidarity. In 2006, he and Per-Anders Forstorp published a book about rhetoric and symbolism in Swedish political campaigns. Mr. Brian Palmers has also done a study of how time pressures are recasting Swedes’ inner lives.
Mr. Palmer is the research director of the Raoul Wallenberg Calendar, a collection of 365 accounts of individuals who took great risks for human rights, peace and democracy. The work is being published internationally in several languages and will be serialized on Radio Sweden on each day of 2013. Also he was a summer host of the radio program “Sommar” i P1 in 2004. He lectures in Sweden and internationally more than forty times per year, with a focus on civic courage and what Susan Sontag called ”the simultaneity of wildly contrasting human fates.”
