Cynthia Browne

Cynthia Browne is a social-cultural anthropologist, writer, and media practitioner. She currently holds a position as Research Scholar in the Department “Knowledge Systems and Collective Life,” directed by Dr. Etienne Benson, at the Max Planck Institute for History of Science in Berlin, Germany. There she leads a working group on the knowledge and politics of exposure. Her current book manuscript, Utopic Wastelands: Art within the Aftermath of German Coal and Steel, examines how contemporary artistic interventions in Germany’s Ruhr region engaged with its land/scape as a site of both loss and possibility.

Her research has been supported by a number of institutions, among them the DAAD (Germany), the National Science Foundation (USA), the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University (USA), and the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies (Germany). Previous research affiliations include the Graduate Research Training Program “Documentary Practices: Excess and Privation” at the Ruhr University in Bochum, the Film Study Center at Harvard University, and the Sensory Ethnography Lab in Cambridge, MA, among others. In 2025, she joined the SEEKCommons project, a network of researchers who explore the role of Open Science in the present and future of socio-environmental research, as a fellow.


Contact
Dr. Cynthia Browne
Anthropology
[email protected]