Kate Brown (professor)

Brown's work is distinguished by its combination of archival research, oral history, sensory observation, reflective autobiography, and innovative literary form in the writing of history. Her Manual for Survival (2019), a ground-level study of the impact of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in nonfiction and was described by The Economist as “a magisterial blend of historical research, investigative journalism, and poetic reportage.” She is the only historian ever to receive the United States’ highest scholarly prizes in Russian studies, U.S. history, Western history, environmental history, and the history of the Americas—all for the same work, Plutopia, a comparative study of nuclear production and social transformation in the cold-war United States and the Soviet Union. Brown is currently working on a global history and future of urban farming.

This collection of essays narrates the histories of locales that have been silenced, broken, or contaminated. In telling these previously unknown stories, Brown examines the making and unmaking of place, and the lives of the people who remain in the fragile landscapes that are left behind. The Atlantic elected Dispatches as one of the Best Books We Read in 2016.

In the 2013 book on a history of these two cities, Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Oxford), Kate Brown explores the health of affected citizens in both the United States and Russia, and the "slow-motion disasters" that still threaten the environments where the plants are located. According to Brown, the plants at Hanford and Mayak, over a period of four decades, "both released more than 200 million curies of radioactive isotopes into the surrounding environment -- twice the amount expelled in the Chernobyl disaster in each instance."

Brown has been the recipient of many of the signature honors in the arts and humanities. These include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Carnegie Fellowship, and a Berlin Prize Fellowship. Her A Biography of No Place (2004), a study of community and identity in eastern Europe's forgotten borderlands, received the George Louis Beer Prize of the American Historical Association (AHA), given for outstanding writing in European international history. Plutopia received three of the highest awards in American history: the AHA's Albert J. Beveridge and John H. Dunning awards and the Ellis W. Hawley Prize of the Organization of American Historians (OAH). The American Society of Environmental History awarded Plutopia the George Perkins Marsh Prize. In addition to these awards, Plutopia was honored with the principal award in Russian/Eurasian studies, as winner of the Wayne S. Vucinich Prize of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) for the most important work in that field in any discipline. Manual for Survival also received multiple scholarly awards, including the Reginald Zelnik Prize in Russian/Eurasian history and the Marshal D. Shulman Prize in foreign policy, both given by ASEEES. Brown's research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the European University Institute, the American Council of Learned Societies, and other leading academic institutions.

Vitali Vitaliev of The Institution of Engineering and Technology calls the book "a magnificent monograph that stands out among the multiple books on Chernobyl simply because it tells us the truth – the whole unadulterated truth – about one of the worst disasters in history." and comments on the effort to downplay the effects: "Let's face it: the minimisation and even trimming-up of history's worst nuclear catastrophe has become a popular sport with some Western intellectuals, among whom I can count some deluded colleagues and friends. They keep repeating like a mantra the ‘magic’ number 62, the official death toll immediately after the 1986 explosion. By doing so, not only do they ignore the plight of tens of thousands of victims of the disaster, many of them children, who have since died of different forms of radiation sickness and cancer, they overlook the treacherous nature of the nuclear contamination and residual radiation capable of manifesting themselves years and even centuries after the tragic event. As Brown, a distinguished American scholar, herself remarks in the final part of her book: “Ignorance about low-dose exposure is, I have argued, partly deliberate.” and goes on to note: "Why were – and are – they doing it? The publishers of ‘Manual for Survival’ rightly suggest in the jacket blurb that the motivation for “(Western) scientists and diplomats from international organisations ... to bury and discredit the evidence” is that they were “worried that this evidence would blow the lid on the effects of massive radiation, released from weapons testing during the Cold War.”

Kate Brown (born (1965-09-24)September 24, 1965) is a Professor of Science, Technology and Society at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the author of Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future (2019), Dispatches from Dystopia (2015), Plutopia (2013), and A Biography of No Place (2004). She was a member of the faculty at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) from 2000 to 2018. She is the founding consulting editor of History Unclassified in the American Historical Review.

This is a biography of a borderland between Russia and Poland, a region where, in 1925, people identified as Poles, Germans, Jews, Ukrainians, and Russians lived side by side. Over the next three decades, this mosaic of cultures was modernized and homogenized out of existence by the ruling might of the Soviet Union, then Nazi Germany, and finally, Polish and Ukrainian nationalism. By the 1950s, this “no place” emerged as a Ukrainian heartland, and the fertile mix of peoples that defined the region was destroyed.