Benjamin Breen | |
---|---|
Born | 1985 |
Academic background | |
Alma mater | University of Texas at Austin |
Academic work | |
Main interests | Early modern history,Portuguese history,History of medicine,Globalization,Science and technology studies |
Notable works | The Age of Intoxication:Origins of the Global Drug Trade (2019) |
Benjamin Breen (born 1985) is an American historian of science and medicine and an Associate Professor of History at the University of California,Santa Cruz. [1] His book The Age of Intoxication (2019) was awarded the 2021 William H. Welch Medal from the American Association for the History of Medicine. [2]
His second book,Tripping on Utopia:Margaret Mead,the Cold War,and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science, [3] delves into the history of psychedelic science from the 1930s through the 1970s and has garnered critical acclaim. Publications such as The New Yorker, [4] The New York Times, [5] and Publishers Weekly [6] have all provided favorable reviews. In addition,Breen's insights have reached a wider audience through his appearance on NPR's Fresh Air in an interview with Terry Gross. [7]
Breen received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Texas at Austin in 2015. [8] His doctoral advisor was Jorge Canizares-Esguerra. [9]
Breen’s work centers on the history of globalization and the long-term impacts of technological and environmental change. [1] He has written on early modern globalization; [10] the Portuguese empire; [11] Atlantic history; [12] the early modern drug trade; [13] the history of psychedelics; [14] and the eighteenth-century impostor George Psalmanazar. [10]
Between 2015 and 2017 Breen was a member of the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University and a lecturer in Columbia's Department of History. [15]
His writing has appeared in The Atlantic , [16] The Paris Review , [17] Aeon , [18] The Public Domain Review , [19] Lapham’s Quarterly , [20] and Slate [21] and been discussed in The New Yorker , [22] [23] The Washington Post , [24] Radio New Zealand, [25] and Le Point . [26]
He was a co-founder and editor of The Appendix [27] and writes the history blog Res Obscura and substack. [28] [29]
Gregory Bateson was an English anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, visual anthropologist, semiotician, and cyberneticist whose work intersected that of many other fields. His writings include Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972) and Mind and Nature (1979).
George Psalmanazar was a Frenchman who claimed to be the first native of Formosa to visit Europe. For some years, he convinced many in Britain; however, he was eventually revealed to be of European origin. He subsequently became a theological essayist, and a friend and acquaintance of Samuel Johnson and other noted figures in 18th-century literary London.
The American Philosophical Society (APS) is an American scholarly organization and learned society founded in 1743 in Philadelphia that promotes knowledge in the humanities and natural sciences through research, professional meetings, publications, library resources, and community outreach. It was founded by Benjamin Franklin and is considered the first learned society in the United States.
The Humboldt University of Berlin is a public research university in the central borough of Mitte in Berlin, Germany.
Louis Menand is an American critic, essayist, and professor who wrote the Pulitzer-winning book The Metaphysical Club (2001), an intellectual and cultural history of late 19th- and early 20th-century America.
The ideas of the Age of Enlightenment came to Spain in the 18th century with the new Bourbon dynasty, following the death of the last Habsburg monarch, Charles II, in 1700. The period of reform and 'enlightened despotism' under the eighteenth-century Bourbons focused on centralizing and modernizing the Spanish government, and improvement of infrastructure, beginning with the rule of King Charles III and the work of his minister, José Moñino, count of Floridablanca. In the political and economic sphere, the crown implemented a series of changes, collectively known as the Bourbon reforms, which were aimed at making the overseas empire more prosperous to the benefit of Spain.
Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilisation is a 1928 book by American anthropologist Margaret Mead based upon her research and study of youth – primarily adolescent girls – on the island of Taʻū in American Samoa. The book details the sexual life of teenagers in Samoan society in the early 20th century, and theorizes that culture has a leading influence on psychosexual development.
Michael Kevin Pollan is an American author and journalist, who is currently Professor of the Practice of Non-Fiction and the first Lewis K. Chan Arts Lecturer at Harvard University. Concurrently, he is the Knight Professor of Science and Environmental Journalism and the director of the Knight Program in Science and Environmental Journalism at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism where in 2020 he cofounded the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics, in which he leads the public-education program. Pollan is best known for his books that explore the socio-cultural impacts of food, such as The Botany of Desire and The Omnivore's Dilemma.
Yoshi Sodeoka is a Japanese-born multimedia artist and musician renowned for his exploration of video, gifs, print and NFTs. Trained as an oil painter from the age of 5 and guitarist from the age of 13, Sodeoka's early immersion in traditional art informs his approach to digital expression. His career has spanned three decades.
Atul Atmaram Gawande is an American surgeon, writer, and public health researcher. He practices general and endocrine surgery at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. He is a professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Samuel O. Thier Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School. In public health, he was the chairman of Ariadne Labs, a joint center for health systems innovation, and chairman of Lifebox, a nonprofit that works on reducing deaths in surgery globally. On June 20, 2018, Gawande was named the CEO of healthcare venture Haven, owned by Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JP Morgan Chase and stepped down as CEO in May 2020, remaining as executive chairman while the organization sought a new CEO.
Hiram Pendleton Caton III was a professor of politics and history at Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia, until his retirement. He was an ethicist, a Fellow of the Australian Institute of Biology, and a founding member of the Association for Politics and the Life Sciences. He was an officer of the International Society for Human Ethology. Caton held a National Humanities Fellowship at the National Humanities Center in 1982–83. He was the inaugural Professor of Humanities at Griffith University in Brisbane, and later the Professor of Politics and History and Head of the School of Applied Ethics there.
Abraham Verghese is an American physician, author and Professor of the Theory and Practice of Medicine and Vice Chair of Education at Stanford University Medical School. He is the author of four best-selling books: two memoirs and two novels. In 2011, he was elected to be a member of the Institute of Medicine. He received the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama in 2015. He is the co-host with Eric Topol of the podcast Medscape Medicine and the Machine.
Peter Mandler, is a British historian and academic specialising in 19th and 20th century British history, particularly cultural history and the history of the social sciences. He is Professor in Modern Cultural History at the University of Cambridge and Bailey fellow in History at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.
Jonathan D. Moreno is an American philosopher and historian who specializes in the intersection of bioethics, culture, science, and national security, and has published seminal works on the history, sociology and politics of biology and medicine. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine.
Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra is a faculty member in the history department at the University of Texas at Austin, where he holds the Alice Drysdale Sheffield Professorship in History. He is most notable for his work in Atlantic history, the history of science in the early modern Spanish empire, and the colonizing ideologies of the Iberian and British empires.
Emily Berquist Soule is a historian of Colonial Latin America and the Spanish Empire.
The various academic faculties, departments, and institutes of the University of Oxford are organised into four divisions, each with its own Head and elected board. They are the Humanities Division; the Social Sciences Division; the Mathematical, Physical and Life Sciences Division; and the Medical Sciences Division.
Researchers have noted the relationship between psychedelics and ecology, particularly in relation to the altered states of consciousness (ASC) produced by psychedelic drugs and the perception of interconnectedness expressed through ecological ideas and themes produced by the psychedelic experience. This is felt through the direct experience of the unity of nature and the environment of which the individual is no longer perceived as separate but intimately connected and embedded inside.
The ideas of the Spanish Enlightenment, which emphasized reason, science, practicality, clarity rather than obscurantism, and secularism, were transmitted from France to the New World in the eighteenth century, following the establishment of the Bourbon monarchy in Spain. In Spanish America, the ideas of the Enlightenment affected educated elites in major urban centers, especially Mexico City, Lima, and Guatemala, where there were universities founded in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In these centers of learning, American-born Spanish intellectuals were already participants in intellectual and scientific discourse, with Spanish American universities increasingly anti-scholastic and opposed to “untested authority” even before the Spanish Bourbons came to power. The best studied is the University of San Carlos Guatemala, founded in 1676.
Faye Hammill FRSE is a professor in the University of Glasgow, specialising in North American and British modern writing in the first half of the twentieth century, what is often called 'middlebrow'. Her recent focus is ocean liners in literature. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (2021).