PDF of my Curriculum Vitae (updated June, 2024)

I am an Associate Professor of History at UC Santa Cruz. My second book, Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science was published by Grand Central in January, 2024. My first book is The Age of Intoxication: Origins of the Global Drug Trade (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019). From 2015 to 2017 I was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University’s Society of Fellows in the Humanities.

At UCSC, I teach classes on early modern Europe and the early modern world (with a focus on the Portuguese and British Empires); the global history of science, technology, and medicine; and the history of drugs, broadly construed.

I am currently accepting PhD students in these and related fields.

Photo by Roya Pakzad

I grew up (mostly) in California and earned my PhD in history from the University of Texas at Austin in 2015, where my advisor was Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra. My research in graduate school was supported by a Fulbright Fellowship to Portugal (2011-2012), a Mellon/ACLS dissertation fellowship, and grants from the Huntington Library, the John Carter Brown Library, and the McNeil Center at the University of Pennsylvania. My dissertation “Tropical Transplantations: Drugs, Nature, and Globalization in the Portuguese and British Empires, 1640-1755” won the best dissertation award from UT Austin and became the basis for my first book, The Age of Intoxication, which was awarded the 2021 William H. Welch medal from the American Association for the History of Medicine. My second book Tripping on Utopia was supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Hellman Foundation.

I have spoken about my work on the NPR show Fresh Air with Terry Gross, PRX’s The World with Marco Werman, Sean Carroll’s Mindscape podcast, and Radio New Zealand, been interviewed by documentary film crews and reporters at The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal, and have written numerous public-facing articles.

I was a co-founder of The Appendix, an online journal of experimental and narrative history (2012-15) and I am strongly committed to the public communication of history and community-engaged scholarship in general. Please get in touch if you think I could be of assistance as an interview subject, speaker, historical consultant, or (especially!) if you are a student interested in any of the topics I study — I am always happy to offer advice.

Email: bebreen [at] ucsc [dot] edu

Twitter: @resobscura

My faculty profile at UC Santa Cruz

Full contact info can be found here.

Third-Person Biography

Benjamin Breen is an associate professor of history at UC Santa Cruz, where he teaches classes on early modern Europe, environmental history, and the history of science, technology, and medicine. From July 2015 to January 2017 he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University, and a lecturer in Columbia’s history department. He received his PhD in history from the University of Texas at Austin in 2015. His first book, The Age of Intoxication: Origins of the Global Drug Trade, was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2019. His second book, Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science, appeared in 2024. He lives in Santa Cruz, California with his partner Roya Pakzad and their two daughters.

short biography

Benjamin Breen is an associate professor of history at UC Santa Cruz and the author of two books: The Age of Intoxication: Origins of the Global Drug Trade (2019) and Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science (2024).