Kate Brown is a professor of history at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County who is “trying to recover the lost histories of modernist wastelands.” She is the author of Plutopia: Nuclear Families in Atomic Cities and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Oxford, 2013), A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (Harvard, 2004), and a collection of essays, Dispatches from Dystopia: Histories of Places Not Yet Forgotten (Chicago, 2015).