About

Benjamin P Breen is an associate professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz, specializing in the history of science, medicine, globalization, and the impacts of technological change. His scholarship focuses on the intersections of these fields, exploring how scientific and medical knowledge has evolved in global contexts and how technological transformations have shaped societies. Breen's most recent book, "Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science" (Grand Central, 2024), offers a revisionist history of the first era of psychedelic science. This work was recognized as one of the best books of the year by The New Yorker and The Chronicle of Higher Education and won the PROSE award from the Association of American Publishers for best book in the history of science, technology, and medicine. He has discussed this book in prominent media outlets, including NPR's Fresh Air and the Mindscape podcast with physicist Sean Carroll. Breen's first book, "The Age of Intoxication: Origins of the Global Drug Trade," received the 2021 William H. Welch Medal from the American Society for the History of Medicine, highlighting his contributions to understanding the historical dimensions of drug trade and intoxication. Currently, he is engaged in research for two future book projects: one on the early modern history of the idea of technological apocalypse, and another examining the James siblings, Francis Galton, and the "prehistory of AI" during the First Gilded Age. Beyond his academic publications, Breen has contributed to a wide range of public writing outlets, including The Washington Post, Paris Review Daily, The Atlantic, Slate, Aeon, and others, demonstrating his commitment to making historical scholarship accessible to broader audiences. He also co-founded The Appendix, a journal of experimental and narrative history, and maintained a history blog, Res Obscura, which has transitioned into a newsletter.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Humanities
• History
• Social Science
• Law
• Sociology
• Art
• Archaeology
• Medicine
• Environmental ethics
• Psychiatry
• Geography
• Economics
• Economic geography
• Economy
• Classics

Selected publications

• Ax-Prover: A Deep Reasoning Agentic Framework for Theorem Proving in Mathematics and Quantum Physics

  ArXiv.org · 2025-10-14

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  We present Ax-Prover, a multi-agent system for automated theorem proving in Lean that can solve problems across diverse scientific domains and operate either autonomously or collaboratively with human experts. To achieve this, Ax-Prover approaches scientific problem solving through formal proof generation, a process that demands both creative reasoning and strict syntactic rigor. Ax-Prover meets this challenge by equipping Large Language Models (LLMs), which provide knowledge and reasoning, with Lean tools via the Model Context Protocol (MCP), which ensure formal correctness. To evaluate its performance as an autonomous prover, we benchmark our approach against frontier LLMs and specialized prover models on two public math benchmarks and on two Lean benchmarks we introduce in the fields of abstract algebra and quantum theory. On public datasets, Ax-Prover is competitive with state-of-the-art provers, while it largely outperforms them on the new benchmarks. This shows that, unlike specialized systems that struggle to generalize, our tool-based agentic theorem prover approach offers a generalizable methodology for formal verification across diverse scientific domains. Furthermore, we demonstrate Ax-Prover's assistant capabilities in a practical use case, showing how it enabled an expert mathematician to formalize the proof of a complex cryptography theorem.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Global Drug Trade

  2025-09-22

  reference-entry1st authorCorresponding

  The global drug trade has profoundly influenced human societies and cultures. Drugs, whether defined as medicinal substances or mind-altering intoxicants, have consistently intersected with critical issues of public health, social control, economic and imperial exploitation, and cross-cultural interaction. This article surveys key multidisciplinary scholarship on the global drug trade from Antiquity to the present, tracing the evolving and culturally contingent definitions of “drugs.” Works cited range from ancient and medieval precursors to the global drug trade to the transformative impact of the Columbian Exchange (which introduced New World psychoactive substances like tobacco and cocaine to Afro-Eurasia). Sections explore the industrialization of drug production, the global drug trade in the nineteenth century, and the rise of global policing and drug enforcement regimes in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Taken collectively, the works in this article highlight how shifting social and legal constructions of drugs and the drug trade have been interwoven with broader patterns of globalization, imperialism, state-building, and evolving conceptions of individual and societal health. By examining the drug trade through cross-cultural and transnational lenses, this scholarship illuminates the complex interplay between mind-altering substances and the modern world that coalesced around their production, distribution, and consumption.

  PublisherDOI

• Large Language Models, Experiential Learning, and AI Simulations in the Classroom: The HistoryLens Framework

  Teaching History A Journal of Methods · 2025-01-16 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This paper introduces the HistoryLens framework, which leverages LLMs to create interactive, primary source-based textual “simulations” that involve students in the process of analyzing, comparing, and critiquing historical narratives. Three case studies from courses taught at UC Santa Cruz in 2023 illustrate the iterative development of HistoryLens, highlighting both its limitations and its potential to encourage student engagement, foster historical empathy, and develop both historical research skills and practical exposure to creative uses of contemporary AI systems. The paper also discusses the challenges and design considerations associated with implementing LLM-enabled educational games and simulations and surveys relevant literature in this emerging field.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• “That Vast Quantity of Laudanum I Have Been Known to Take”

  English Language Notes · 2022-04-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract An impostor who claimed to be a refugee from Formosa (present-day Taiwan) named George Psalmanazar (1679?–1763) embodied two key aspects of addiction in eighteenth-century Europe: its connections to globalization and imperialism, and the complex interplay between the concept of “positive” addictions (such as addiction to study, devotion, or duty) and the growing attention paid to “negative” ones (addiction to superstition, sexuality, or intoxicating substances). Constantly changing his identity in response to his audience’s expectations, Psalmanazar lived a life of continual performance—performance that hinged on trading one set of addictions for another. As he abandoned his falsified persona as an opiate-addicted, sexually licentious Taiwanese aristocrat, Psalmanazar embraced a postimposture persona as a pious scholar of religion who, like the holy men he studied, was “addicted to the reading . . . [of] sacred writings.” Strikingly, however, this second life as a humble scholar was sustained by regular opiate use. What had changed was how Psalmanazar thought about his use of the drug: no longer in the service of “vanity” or “extravagance” but instead in the service of God. With their blend of introspection and self-deception, Psalmanazar’s Memoirs (1764) index the changing social and cultural roles of opiates and the concept of addiction in eighteenth-century Europe and beyond.

  PublisherDOI

• Galenic Pharmacy - Compound Remedies: Galenic Pharmacy from the Ancient Mediterranean to New Spain. By Paula S. de Vos. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021. Pp xiv, 381. 4 maps. 6 appendices. $50.00 cloth.

  Américas · 2022

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Humanities
  • Political Science
  • History

  Galenic Pharmacy - Compound Remedies: Galenic Pharmacy from the Ancient Mediterranean to New Spain. By Paula S. de Vos. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021. Pp xiv, 381. 4 maps. 6 appendices. $50.00 cloth. - Volume 79 Issue 2

  PublisherDOI

• The Failed Globalization of Psychedelic Drugs in the Early Modern World

  The Historical Journal · 2021 · 4 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Social Science

  Abstract This article reassesses what has been called ‘the puzzle of distribution’: why did some drugs rapidly emerge as global consumer goods in the era of the Columbian Exchange, whereas others remained restricted to regional centres of usage? I argue here that the early modern concept of transplantation allows us to approach the puzzle of distribution from a novel perspective. Early modern intoxicants were not disaggregated, free-floating commodities. Their consumption and trade took place within a larger constellation of social codes, cultural practices, ecologies, and built environments. Psychedelic compounds such as peyote and ayahuasca serve here as case studies for examining how the globalization of drugs involved far more than the transport of the substances themselves. Despite their centrality to numerous societies throughout the pre-Columbian Americas, the larger ‘assemblage’ of material cultures, cultural assumptions, and religious meanings that accrued around these substances made it difficult for them to follow the same paths as commodified drugs like cacao or tobacco.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Age of Intoxication: Origins of the Global Drug Trade

  2021 · 3 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Medicine
  • Psychiatry

  "The book traces the drug trade's emergence on a world stage, the main points of contact and conflict that key early modern drugs initiated, and the accompanying backlashes"--

• THE FLIP SIDE OF THE PHARMACOPOEIA:

  University of Pittsburgh Press eBooks · 2019-09-10 · 3 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Chapter 3. Empires on Drugs: Pharmaceutical Go-Betweens and the Anglo-Portuguese Alliance

  University of Pennsylvania Press eBooks · 2018-07-06 · 14 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• KNOWLEDGE AND HEALING IN THE EARLY MODERN ATLANTIC - The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic. By Pablo Gómez. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. Pp. xxii + 314. $85.00, hardback (ISBN 9781496990861); $29.95, paperback (9781469630878).

  The Journal of African History · 2018-07-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  KNOWLEDGE AND HEALING IN THE EARLY MODERN ATLANTIC - The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic. By Pablo Gómez. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. Pp. xxii + 314. 29.95, paperback (9781469630878). - Volume 59 Issue 2

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Jorge Cañizares‐Esguerra

  The University of Texas at Austin

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• William H. Welch Medal from the American Association for the…
• National Endowment for the Humanities Award for researching…
• Society of Fellows Postdoctoral Fellowship, Columbia Univers…
• Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in Critical Bibliography (2014-1…
• Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship (2014-15)