Welcome

I’m an associate professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz specializing in the history of science, medicine, globalization, and the impacts of technological change. 

My most recent book, Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science (Grand Central, 2024), is a revisionist history of the first era of psychedelic science. It was named one of the best books of the year by The New Yorker and The Chronicle of Higher Education and won the PROSE award from the Association of American Publishers for best book in the history of science, technology and medicine. I spoke about the book with Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air and with physicist Sean Carroll on his Mindscape podcast.

My first book The Age of Intoxication: Origins of the Global Drug Trade won the 2021 William H. Welch Medal from the American Society for the History of Medicine. I am currently researching two future book projects: an early modern history of the idea of technological apocalypse, and a book about the James siblings (William, Alice, and Henry), Francis Galton, and the “prehistory of AI” during the First Gilded Age.

In addition to my academic articles, I’ve written for The Washington Post, Paris Review Daily, The Atlantic, Slate, Aeon, The Pacific Standard, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Public Domain Review, Nautilus, and Lapham’s Quarterly. You can find a full list here.

I co-founded The Appendix, a journal of experimental and narrative history (2012-15) and wrote a history blog, Res Obscura (2009-2020). It’s now a newsletter that you can subscribe to below:

Contact and biography

CV: Here (updated June 2024)

Email: bebreen [at] ucsc [dot] edu

My about page is here.

Complete contact info is here.

PDFs of my academic articles and chapters are available here.