Professor of History, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Bosch Fellow in Public Policy - Class of Spring 2017
Kate Brown is a professor of history at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and the author of Plutopia: Nuclear Families in Atomic Cities and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Oxford, 2013), which received seven scholarly awards in the fields of environmental history, Slavic studies, and general history. Brown is also the author of 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), in which she chronicles “the hapless adventures of an historian trying to recover the lost histories of modernist wastelands.”
Brown’s writing has appeared in the New York Times, Times Literary Supplement, Slate, American Historical Review, Chronicle of Higher Education, Kritika, and Aeon Magazine. A 2009 Guggenheim Fellow, she has also received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, American Council of Learned Societies, Social Science Research Council, and the National Council for East European and Eurasian Research, among others. In 2015 she received the University of Maryland Regents’ Award for Excellence in Research and the John H. Dunning Prize of the American Historical Association. During her time in Berlin, she is also be an Andrew Carnegie Fellow.
Academy Activities
11
May
17
Head-to-Head: A Meeting of Inspired Minds
Life after the Chernobyl Disaster: Human Survival in Times of Ecological Crises
Historian and Academy fellow Kate Brown and renowned technology-assessment expert Armin Grunwald discuss Chernnobyl and human adaptivity at Hospitalhof Stuttgart.
25
Apr
17
Bosch Public Policy Lecture
Plutopia
In order to contain secrets, American and Soviet managers of the world’s first plutonium plants created “plutopias”-- communities of nuclear families living in highly subsidized, limited-access atomic cities. In this lecture, Kate Brown parses the social life of these bubbles of immunity.
15
Mar
17
Fellow Spotlight: Kate Brown
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 ...
27
Apr
17
Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters
During the Cold War, American and Soviet managers of the world’s first plutonium plants created “plutopias”—communities of nuclear families living in highly subsidized, limited-access atomic cities. Fully staffed and medically monitored, residents of the Hanford plant (near Richland, Washing ...