ABOUT KATE BROWN

Kate Brown grew up in Elgin, Illinois, a rustbelt community near Chicago. She attributes her attraction to modernist wastlands to a childhood in Elgin ghosting through empty buildings wondering who was the last to turn out the lights. Read more here.

Brown has an undergraduate degree from UW/Madison and a PhD from the University of Washington/Seattle. She started her career at UMBC in Baltimore. She is currently the Thomas M. Siebel Distinguished Professor in the History of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 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. 

Brown is the founding editor of History Unclassified, a section of the American Historical Review. History Unclassified enourages authors to cross boundaries, undermine binaries, and encourage experimentation in the AHR, the flagship journal of the historical profession. The idea of History Unclassified is to create a space for thinking differently about what forms history can take. 

Kate Brown has written five books.  Manual for Survival (2019), a ground-level study of the medical and environmental impacts of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, was described by The Economist as “a magisterial blend of historical research, investigative journalism, and poetic reportage. In 2015, Brown published Dispatches from Dystopia, a collection of essays about the making and unmaking of historicaly narratives. 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 recently completed a global history and future of urban farming called Tiny Gardens Everywhere (Norton  and Bodley Head (UK) 2026). Brown’s first book, A Biography of No Place, is about the creation of ethnic identity and the cleansing of ethnic minorities in Ukraine during the Stalinist period.

Brown has been the recipient of many of the signature honors in the arts and humanities. These include fellowships from Guggenheim Foundation, the Carnegie Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, and the Berlin Prize Fellowship.