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 and was named one of the best books of the year by The New Yorker and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

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

Substack: https://resobscura.substack.com

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 and writes about the history of science, medicine, drugs, empire, and technological change. 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. He is the author of The Age of Intoxication: Origins of the Global Drug Trade (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), which won the 2021 William H. Welch Medal from the American Association for the History of Medicine, and Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science (Grand Central, 2024), winner of the 2025 PROSE Award for Best Book in the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology.

Breen received his PhD in history from the University of Texas at Austin in 2015. His writing has appeared in venues including The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Paris Review Daily, Slate, Aeon, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Nautilus, and Lapham’s Quarterly. He writes the newsletter Res Obscura. His current book project, Ghosts of the Machine Age, tells the story of the first era when machines invaded the mind. Spanning the 1860s to the onset of World War I, it follows the siblings William, Alice, and Henry James — the first generation to grow up within a self-proclaimed “Machine Age” — alongside Francis Galton, W.E.B. Du Bois, and the founders of modern psychology, as they struggled to define the irreducible experience of consciousness in a Gilded Age world increasingly governed by data and mass surveillance. He lives in Santa Cruz, California with his wife 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).