Colleagues remember Brown University professor emeritus after tragic death

CRANSTON, R.I. (WLNE) — A Cranston woman who died after she was accidentally hit by a vehicle earlier this month is being remembered as a remarkable historian and professor.

Absolutely brilliant, generous and kind are just a few of the words colleagues used to describe 77-year-old Lundy Braun.

“It’s an awful, just unbelievable tragedy,” said Evelynn Hammonds, a professor at Harvard University. “She was an incredible scholar, friend, colleague, all of that and this is so shocking.”

Braun died after being hit by a vehicle in Cranston back on Aug. 9.

“She was somebody who was very open to a number of early faculty of color who were working in this field and sort of gave us credence and treated us like colleagues and embraced the work we were doing,” said Adam Biggs, an assistant professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. “It is a tremendous loss.”

Braun was well known in her field as an emeritus professor with a PhD in medical science and Africana studies at Brown University.

She was also a historian devoting her now internationally recognized research to race and the history of medicine.

“She traced how this particular piece of medical technology, which was used to measure breathing capacity, was often also a tool for reifying notions of racial difference,” explained Biggs.

That piece of medical technology is a spirometer and it led Braun to write a book called ‘Breathing Race into the Machine’; it was published in 2021.

According to those who knew Braun, people will learn from her book for decades to come.

“Lots of people teach from it from all different kinds of disciplines because it’s so beautifully written, it’s so well argued, it’s just an important book,” said Hammonds. “Her legacy was that she both did groundbreaking work herself but she also taught legions of medical students at Brown and emphasized in her most recent work the need for medical students to understand the history of the ways in which medicine had been involved in systemic racism.”