Dr. Kate Brown is a professor of environmental and nuclear history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research covers a number of countries and brings personal accounts into conversation with quantitative studies. She has traveled extensively through areas impacted by the fallout of Chernobyl, interviewed a number of survivors, and researched in only recently opened archives in the former Soviet Union. Her most recent book is Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future, (W.W. Norton, 2019) which complements her earlier, award-winning, work Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Oxford, 2013).

Kate Brown’s Award Winning Books:

Some Highlights:

Studying and working in the Soviet Union

Making connections in Eastern Europe

Chernobyl Nuclear Catastrophe

Archives in the former Soviet Union

Radioactive produce and clothes

Reading between the lines in Medical Archives

Reception of Kate Brown’s work

Future technologies and potential issues

The Global environmental system

Suggestions:

Steven: Use tools such as Google Earth to walk around Chernobyl and start engaging with the environment and world around you, like this Canadian Teen (Discovery or Not?).

Kate: Help the sciences and humanities to work together. Just because you are not in a science department doesn’t mean you can’t do history of science. Rather, precisely because you are in the humanities you need to engage in environmental history. (For examples of this check out books written by Kate Brown and my podcast with Rebecca Bond).

Cover image credit: Jorge Franganillo

Translation: Passage is forbidden! Danger zone.

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