Gísli Pálsson is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Iceland. He has written extensively on a variety of issues, including human-environmental relations, slavery, biomedicine, and the social context of genomics. He has done fieldwork in Iceland, the Republic of Cape Verde, the Canadian Arctic, and the Virgin Islands. He has written over 130 articles in scientific journals and edited books. His most recent books are The Man Who Stole Himself: The Slave Odyssey of Hans Jonathan (Chicago, 2016); Nature, Culture, and Society: Anthropological Perspectives on Life (Cambridge, 2015), Can Science Resolve the Nature/Nurture Debate? (with Margaret Lock, John Wiley, 2016), and Biosocial Becomings: Integrating Social and Biological Anthropology (co-edited with Timothy Ingold, Cambridge, 2013). Pálsson has received a number of Icelandic and international honours for his academic work, including the Icelandic Asa Wright Medal for excellence in research, Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, the Rosenstiel Award for research from the University of Miami, and from the College of William & Mary, an award for the best book on historical anthropology. He has served on various international boards and committees, including the European Science Foundation.
Down to Earth: A Memoir