Kate Brown, a professor of history, was recently interviewed by Process, the blog of the Organization of American Historians (OAH), the Journal of American History (JAH), and The American Historian (TAH), about her award-winning book Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Oxford University Press, 2013).
The posted interview is in Q&A format and Process asked Prof. Brown about her inspiration, research process, and difficulties in writing the book: “…it was difficult to integrate labor, urban, cultural and environmental history with the history of science and medicine, and to do so in the context of two national histories. I worried initially that I was missing a lot, making major mistakes in this or that historical subfield, and that generally I was trespassing where I did not belong.
And then I stopped worrying about it. I have long believed that histories written to define or protect professional expertise manage only to distance historians from their audience, but in researching Plutopia, I was also was well aware that the compartmentalization of knowledge into discrete fields caused many of the environmental and health problems at both plants.”
Brown received several awards for Plutopia, including the American Historical Association’s 2014 Albert J. Beveridge Award. Read Kate Brown’s complete interview in Process.
