Professor of Science, Technology and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), she has received numerous awards for her books. A Biography of No Place: from Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (2004) won the George Louis Beer Award from the American Historical Association. Plutopia: Nuclear Families in Atomic Cities and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (2013) was awarded the Albert J. Beveridge and John H. Dunning Awards of the United States Historical Association, the George Perkins Marsh Prize of the American Society for Environmental History, the Ellis W. Hawley Prize of the Organization of American Historians, and the Robert G. Athearn Award from the Western History Association. Dispatches from Dystopia: Histories of Places not yet Forgotten (2015) was selected to Atlantic Monthly's "Best Books to Read in 2016" list. In 2015, Brown received the University of Maryland Regents Award for Research Excellence. In 2017 he received the American Academy Award in Berlin. She is a consulting editor of the American Historical Review and serves as senior editor of International Labor and Working Class History, and has published articles in American Historical Review, Chronicle of Higher Education, Kritika, Aeon Magazine, Slate Magazine, and The Times Literary Supplement.