About our staff

I was born in Corvallis, Oregon and spent my childhood there until leaving for college. I did my PhD at the University of Texas at Austin in environmental history and African history and finished in 2012. I then went on to join the faculty of history at the University of Northern Colorado as an assistant professor and also spent time in Berlin as a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. In 2018, I joined the staff of HCA as a lectuer in environmental history. 

www.ebrownell.com

Summary of research interests

• Africa

• Urban

• Twentieth Century & After

My work sits at the intersection of environmental history, history of technology, and African history. My book, Gone to Ground: An Environmental and Infrastructural History of Dar es Salaam, explores the dramatic material and environmental transformations of Tanzania’s largest city. The core of my book is focused on the decade in between the oil crisis in the early 1970s and the end of a prolonged economic crisis in the 1980s. This was a period marked by severe commodity shortages and persistent infrastructural failure forcing urbanites to develop a repertoire of skills and strategies to confront their new reality. Organized thematically, Gone to Ground explores such topics as how building materials reflected national ideologies of a socialist utopia, how waiting for the bus became a national conversation about workplace productivity, what happened when the state ordered urbanites and parastatal factories to farm, and how conversations about urban pollution doubled as attempts to control Dar’s expanding informal economy.

My new project, Stories from the Substrate, aims to narrate East African history through a variety of case studies of how people, animals, and plants have made and remade the region in the last century through their engagements with the soil. 

 I also have an ongoing project on histories of colonial and postcolonial planning that came of my time at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. 

Global Connections since 1450

The Global Economy since 1750

Historical Skills and Methods

History of the World in 9 Things

Place and Displacement: Histories of Refugees and Humanitarianism in 20th Century Africa

Global Environmental History

Introduction to Contemporary History