Benjamin Breen

Research Interests

Early modern world history, particularly the history of the tropics; early modern globalization and the slave trade; Spanish and Portuguese empires; history of drugs and poisons; early modern science, medicine, and technology; magic in a cross-cultural context.

Biography, Education and Training

Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin, May 2015.

Honors, Awards and Grants

Society of Fellows Postdoctoral Fellowship, Columbia University 2015-2016
Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in Critical Bibliography, 2014-16
Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship, 2014-15
Dissertation Fellow, McNeil Center for Early American Studies, University of Pennsylvania, 2013-14
Fulbright fellowship to Portugal, 2011-2012

Selected Publications

“Empires on Drugs: Materia Medica and the Anglo-Portuguese Alliance,” in Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, ed. Entangled Empires: The Anglo-Iberian Atlantic, 1500-1830 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018).

“No Man Is an Island: Early Modern Globalization, Knowledge Networks, and George Psalmanazar’s Formosa,” The Journal of Early Modern History, 17/4 (August, 2013), 391-417.

“Hybrid Atlantics: Future Directions for the History of the Atlantic World,” History Compass, 18/8 (August, 2013), 597-609.

"'The Elks Are Our Horses’: Animals and Domestication in the New French Borderlands,” Journal of Early American History, No. 3 (December, 2013), 188-205  

“Portugal, Early Modern Globalization and the Origins of the Global Drug Trade,” Perspectives on Europe, Vol. 42, No. 1 (Spring 2012), 84-88.

Selected popular writing:

“Palm Trees and Potions: On Portuguese Pharmacy Signs,” The Recipes Project, July, 2016.

"Into the Mystic," Aeon Magazine, 2015.

“Victorian Occultism and the Art of Synesthesia,” in The Public Domain Review, 2014.

"The King of the Islands of Refreshment" in The Appendix, 2014.

"The Literature of Laughing Gas," in The Paris Review, 2014.

"The Pre-Modern History of Outer Space," in The Atlantic, 2013.

Teaching Interests

- Early modern science, medicine, and technology
- History of the Iberian peninsula and of the Spanish and Portuguese empires
- History of drugs and poisons
- Travel writing of the 17th and 18th centuries
- History of magic

Courses Taught