Lecture by Professor Kate Brown (University of Maryland, Baltimore County): "Dispatches from Dystopia: Histories of Places Not Yet Forgotten"

Abstract

Historians are usually fixated on archives, documents, and texts at the cost of overlooking the places where their histories occurred. In Dispatches from Dystopia: Histories of Places Not Yet Forgotten (University of Chicago, 2015), Brown narrates the making and unmaking of place in locales that have been silenced, broken, or contaminated. In this talk, Brown turns to human bodies as both place and archive. She examines why both the American and Russian governments have been quick to recognize the contamination of territory exposed to nuclear production, but far more reluctant to acknowledge the existence of radioactive isotopes in the bodies of people living nearby. She argues that a preoccupation with sequestered archives and environmental monitoring has obfuscated the discovery of the greatest mystery of all—the effect on human history of bodies turned into radioactive storage sites.

Kate Brown is Professor of History at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She is the author of two award-winning books, Plutopia: Nuclear Families in Atomic Cities (Oxford 2013) and A History of No Place (Harvard 2004).

This event is sponsored by University of Montreal's Department of Comparative Literature, Center for East Asian Studies, and Vice-President's Office for Academic Creation and Innovation, and by Concordia University's Department of History, the Department of Geography, Planning and Environment, and the Geography Undergraduate Student Society at Concordia University.