'Plutonium cities,' climate change at issue

The winter’s lectures at Bates begin with two intriguing guests.

Kate Brown, an award-winning historian at the University of Maryland, discusses “plutonium cities” in the U.S. and Soviet Union at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 13, in the Keck Classroom (G52), Pettengill Hall, 4 Andrews Road (Alumni Walk).

A day later, Kerry Emanuel, an influential professor of meteorology at MIT, presents Uncertainty, Modeling and Climate Change at 4 p.m. Friday, Jan. 14, in Room 204 of Carnegie Science Hall, 44 Campus Ave.

Titled Plutopolis: How Secrecy, Security and Radiation Made Model Communities and Model Citizens in the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., Brown’s talk is sponsored by the politics department and the Mellon Innovation Fund. For more information, please contact 207-786-8295.

Emanuel’s talk is sponsored by the chemistry, physics and geology departments and the environmental studies program. To learn more, please contact 207-786-6924.

Brown is the author of the book A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (Harvard University Press, 2005). Her presentation at Bates will compare the communities surrounding early plutonium plants, in Hanford, Wash., and Maiak, Russia.

Named one of Time Magazine’s 100 influential people for 2006, Emanuel was in the news the previous year thanks to a study, published less than a month before Hurricane Katrina, linking the increasing force of hurricanes to the rise in global temperature.