Renowned historian Kate Brown will present the Carleton College Herbert P. Lefler Lecture on Thursday, Oct. 24 at 5:30 p.m. in Leighton Hall room 305. Her presentation, entitled “Plutopia: Nuclear Families in Atomic Cities and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters,” is free and open to the public.
Brown’s lecture shares its title with her latest book, published this year by Oxford University Press. “Plutopia: Nuclear Families in Atomic Cities and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters” provides a historical account of the first two cities in the world to produce plutonium: Richland, United States and Ozersk, Russia. The book is the first transnational history of nuclear disaster on a local level.
Brown is also the author of “A Biography of No Place: From Ethic Borderland to Soviet Heartland” (2004), which won the American Historical Association's George Louis Beer Prize for the Best Book in International European History.
A 2009 Guggenheim Fellow, Brown has been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Social Science Research Council, the National Council for East European and Eurasian Research, the International Research and Exchange Board, the Eurasia Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, Harvard University's Davis Center, UMBC's Dresher Center and the Kennan Institute in Washington, D.C. She is working on a collection of essays called Being There, which explores place and the construction of space as a springboard for histories of communities and territories which have been silenced or destroyed.
Brown is a Professor of History at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Her work has appeared in the American Historical Review, Chronicle of Higher Education, Harper's on-line edition, Kritika, Aeon and Slate, and the Times Literary Supplement.
The event is sponsored by the Herbert P. Lefler Lecture series, in collaboration with the Carleton College Department of History. For more information, including disability accommodations, call (507) 222-4217. Leighton Hall is located at the end of College Street on the Carleton campus.
