Prof. Kate Brown

Kate Brown’s research interests illuminate the point where history, science, technology and bio-politics converge to create large-scale disasters and modernist wastelands. She has written four books about topics ranging from population politics, linguistic mapping, the production of nuclear weapons and concomitant utopian communities, the health and environmental consequences of nuclear fallout from the Chernobyl disaster to narrative innovations of history writing in the 21st century. She is currently heading in a new direction, working on a manuscript called “Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The History of the Self-Provisioning City.” This history follows plants and people who tended them through 20th-century urban history. How essential were welfare landscapes to sustain increasingly unsustainable urban conglomerations in Europe and North America? Urban gardeners in the long 20th century accomplished many of the goals of food sustainability reformers today. They produced local, diverse, organic food on marginal land with short market chains and few post-harvest food losses. Growers recycled the wealth of nutrients generated in urban households and remediated contaminated earth, which in turn disrupted the metabolic rift that impoverished soils and fueled colonization elsewhere. Gardeners’ technologies produced economies, ecologies, and nutrients that engineered humans to be at the center of their environments, adapted to it, belonging.

Brown teaches environmental history, the history of food production, the history of plants and people, wild and cultivated, and a seminar on narrating the Anthropocene. Her graduate seminars focus on exploring creative non-fiction narrative modes.