Professional Bio

Margaret (Meg) Palmer is a postdoctoral scholar at Penn State in the Department of Sociology and Criminology. Her research examines how popular culture produces and contests hierarchies of gender and sexuality, and increasingly, how these dynamics intersect with political polarization. Her empirical focus is young adult literature and publishing, which she studies through computational text and network analysis of literary and publishing industry data.

She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2026. Her dissertation, Pride Versus Prejudice: LGBTQ+ Young Adult Romance Fiction Production and Content in Unsettled Times, examines the production, reception, and content of LGBTQ+ young adult literature. Her work appears in SSM – Qualitative Research in Health and Sexuality Research and Social Policy.