Benjamin Prostine

Benjamin Prostine is a PhD student who studies the history of capitalism, agriculture, and the environment in twentieth century North America. His dissertation looks at dairy farming in the United States across the long twentieth century, following cows, workers, soil, milk, and manure through the archives. Recognizing how social systems not only transform labor and landscapes but also animals, this project aims to tell the story of what it has meant to be a cow under capitalism. He is currently working on a journal article that looks at the transformation of livestock breeding in the twentieth century through the rise of artificial insemination and the business of bull semen. 

With previous work in poetry, journalism, and radio, he has also written on incarceration, labor, utopian communes, prairies and protests. A former inhabitant of Iowa and Wisconsin, he continues to seek a satisfying answer to the question “What is the Midwest?”