Bryan Knapp

Biography

Bryan Knapp works on the compromises and conflicts between states, corporations, communities and individuals within the politics of survival. Knapp's recent project queried a boycott in the 1970s and 80s against the largest food company on the planet, when activists accused Nestlé of killing babies in developing countries with its infant formula products. Nestlé countered that it and the formula industry actually saved babies, contributed to local development, and solved many of the world’s economic and health problems. At its most concrete, the project focuses on infant health and political struggles over the private choices and basic economic opportunities of ordinary people. At its most abstract, the work demystifies the multinational corporation at a moment, the 1970s, when it entered American consciousness as a global source of social injustice. Corporations like Nestlé achieved their global position by infiltrating and commodifying one of the most intimate realms of human life – the political site of a woman’s breast and her feeding child. Knapp's current research project, called "Atomic Universalism," for which he was appointed W.M. Keck Fellow at the Huntington Library, investigates the social and political history of the atom. This includes water politics, public and private electrification, the privatization of nuclear weapons manufacturing, and the word “reclaim” within the Bureau of Reclamation’s mandate and self-perception. This project again traces core materialities such as water and the basic unit of matter to help illuminate the biopolitics and geopolitics of human survival on earth. Knapp argues that harnessing the power of the atom created an unprecedented awareness of humanity-as species, and a corresponding global effort to “save the world,” which really and always meant “save” the species itself, as a unit of analysis, and its own collective, communal sustainability. Knapp will teach the following courses at Connecticut College: Music and Social Activism (First-Year Seminar); Introduction to U.S. History; Honors Study, American Studies; The Global 1960s. Knapp received a bachelor's degree with honors and distinction from the University of California, Santa Barbara, a master's degree from Washington University in St. Louis, and a master's and a doctorate from Brown University.

Research Interest

MODERN UNITED STATES GLOBAL CAPITALISM AND DEVELOPMENT TRANSNATIONAL GRASSROOTS POLITICS SEXUALITY AND THE POLITICS OF REPRODUCTION AMERICA IN A GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE ECOLOGICAL AND WORLD ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY LITERATURE, ART AND SOCIAL CHANGE HUMAN RIGHTS, JUSTICE AND GLOBAL GOVERNANCE