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 genomics. He has done fieldwork in Iceland, the Republic of Cape Verde, the Canadian Arctic, and the Virgin Islands. He is the author, editor, or co-editor of many books, including Anthropology and the New Genetics (2007); Biosocial Becomings: Integrating Social and Biological Anthropology, co-edited with Tim Ingold (2013), Nature, Culture, and Society: Anthropological Perspectives on Life (2016), Can Science Solve the Nature/Nurture Debate?, with Margaret Lock (2016), and The Man Who Stole Himself (2016).
Pálsson has a keen interest in photography and human/other-than-human relations. Recently he has embarked on a new project that combines scholarship and the arts, science and history: the fate of the Great Auk (Penguinus impennis), which became extinct by the mid-19th century.