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. 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. 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.
Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland 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.
Dispatches from Dystopia: A History of Places Not Yet Forgotten. 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.
Plutopia Richland, Washington, was the first city established to support plutonium production at the nearby Hanford nuclear site, to power the American nuclear weapons arsenals. Ozersk, Russia, supported plutonium production to power the Soviet nuclear arsenals at the Mayak nuclear plant. These were the first two cities in the world to produce plutonium for use in Cold War atomic bombs. 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 says that most of this radioactive contamination over the years at Hanford and Mayak were part of normal operations, but unforeseen accidents did occur and plant management kept this secret, as the pollution continued unabated. Even today, as pollution threats to health and the environment persist, the government keeps knowledge about the associated risks from the public.
Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future
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