Dona L. Brown, Professor

• Ph.D., University of Massachusetts-Amherst, 1989
• C.V.

Area of expertise

Vermont, U.S., cultural

Contact Information

Email: Dona L. Brown

Office Hours, Location and Class Schedule

Dona Brown is a Professor in the Department of History. She came to UVM in 1994 after having earned her Ph. D. at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Her first book, Inventing New England: Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth Century (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), explored the significance of the tourist trade in creating an enduring image of New England. She has also published a number of articles on the history of tourism and regionalism, and is the editor of a collection of nineteenth-century tourist stories (A Tourist's New England: Travel Fiction, 1820-1920). She teaches courses in United States cultural history, New England history, and Vermont history. Many of her courses are cross-listed with the Vermont Studies program, and she was director of the Center for Research on Vermont from 2003 to 2006.   She has recently completed a book about American back-to-the-land movements in the twentieth century:  Back to the Land: The Enduring Dream of Self-Sufficiency in Modern America (University of Wisconsin Press, 2011).  For that book, she took a break from her focus on local and regional history, looking as far afield as California and New Jersey for her stories.  She is still interested in local and regional history, however:  most recently, she published “The Landscape of Self-Sufficiency: New England Farms and the Back-to-the-Land Movement of the 1930s,” in New England: A Landscape History (MIT Press, 2011).

Faculty

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