Shannon Brown is a historian of science and technology, the global Cold War, and Canada in the world. She completed her PhD at Queen’s University in 2025. Her dissertation examines the history of space infrastructure in Canada. By highlighting the seemingly mundane work of designing, building, and maintaining satellite systems, she shows how Canadians used them to both challenge and reinforce the distribution of national and global power. Her publications include histories of engineers and the daily work of globalization, the creation of the Canadian Space Agency, and queer commemoration in Toronto. The latter two were awarded the Sacknoff Prize for Space History and the award for best article in the Journal of Canadian Studies, respectively. Before arriving at Queen's, she studied astrophysics at the University of Toronto.
Publications
- “Global Gateways: Corporate Engineers and Commercial Satellite Infrastructure, 1969-1985,” in Globalizing the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, edited by Hugh Slotten and Hamish Spencer, forthcoming from Palgrave.
- “Enacting NASA North: The Uses of Science Policy and the Creation of the Canadian Space Agency,” Quest: The History of Spaceflight Quarterly 28, no. 3 (2021): 7-21.
- “Molly Wood’s Bush: Settler Colonialism, Queer Activism, and Commemoration in Toronto,” Journal of Canadian Studies 54, no. 2-3 (2020): 290-319.
- with D.-S. Moon, Y.N. Qi, et al. “High-cadence multi-color observations of the dwarf nova KSP-OT-201503a by the KMTNet Supernova Program,” Astrophysical Journal 820 (2018).
