Benjamin Breen

Breen received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Texas at Austin in 2015.[3] His doctoral advisor was Jorge Canizares-Esguerra.[4]

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;[5] the Portuguese empire;[6] Atlantic history;[7] the early modern drug trade;[8] the history of psychedelics;[9] and the eighteenth-century impostor George Psalmanazar.[5]

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.[10]

His writing has appeared in The Atlantic,[11] The Paris Review,[12] Aeon,[13] The Public Domain Review,[14] Lapham’s Quarterly,[15] and Slate[16] and been discussed in The New Yorker,[17][18]The Washington Post,[19] Radio New Zealand,[20] and Le Point.[21]

He was a co-founder and editor of The Appendix[22] and writes the history blog Res Obscura and substack.[23][24]

• 2021 The William H. Welch Medal of the American Association for the History of Medicine[2]
• 2021 National Endowment for the Humanities Award for Faculty.[25]
• 2014-15 Huntington Library visiting fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford.[26]
• 2011-12 Fulbright Fellowship (Portugal).[27]

• The Age of Intoxication: Origins of the Global Drug Trade (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).
• Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science (Grand Central Publishing, 2024).[28]