Institute at Brown for Environment and Society

Rebecca Altman (she/her) holds a PhD in the sociology of health and the environment from Brown University. Her research and writing explore the history of global plastics and their associated pollutants. Recent work has appeared in Science, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Aeon and Orion, for whom she also guest-edited a series of four essays on plastics and petrochemistry. Since 2010, Rebecca has served on the Board of Directors of the Science and Environmental Health Network. Her first book, The Song of Styrene: An Intimate History of Plastics, is forthcoming from Scribner (US) and Oneworld (UK), which, just shy of the centennial of polystyrene plastics, relays the global history of this world-changing material through the story of two 20th-century lives caught up in its making. In fall 2024, Rebecca co-taught the IBES capstone course, Narrating the Anthropocene, with the environmental historian Bathsheba Demuth.