Disarming Toxic Empire

March 2122, 2024 Austin, Texas

Participants

Itty Abraham

Professor, School for the Future of Innovation in Society and Senior Global Futures Scholar Arizona State University

Itty Abraham is Professor in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and Senior Global Futures Scholar at Arizona State University. He studies international relations and science and technology studies, with a special interest in nuclear studies. Abraham has written two single-authored scholarly books and edited and co-edited three volumes. Other published works include studies of the impact of digital technologies on postcolonial citizenship, refugee studies, and Indian foreign policy.  He has received grants from the National Science Foundation, US Institute of Peace, the Ford Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation, among others, and he was a senior Fulbright-Nehru scholar in 2011. From 2006 to 2012, Abraham directed the South Asia Institute at University of Texas at Austin, with a tenured appointment in Government and Asian Studies. He earned a Ph.D. in international relations and political theory from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Rosemary Candelario

Associate Professor of Performance as Public Practice The University of Texas at Austin

Rosemary Candelario is Associate Professor of Performance as Public Practice at the University of Texas. She writes about and makes dances engaged with Asian and Asian American dance, butoh, ecology and site-related performance. Candelario was awarded the 2018 Oscar G. Brockett Book Prize for Dance Research for her book Flowers Cracking Concrete: Eiko & Koma's Asian/American Choreographies (Wesleyan University Press, 2016) and received the 2022 Mid-Career Award from the Dance Studies Association. She is the co-editor with Bruce Baird of The Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance (2018) and with Matthew Henley of Dance Research Methodologies: Ethics, Orientations, Practices (Routledge, 2023). Recent choreographic premieres include aqueous (site version, 2021), aqueous (stage version 2019) and 100 Ways to Kiss the Trees (2018). She earned a Ph.D. in Culture and Performance from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Luis E. Cárcamo-Huechante

Director of Native American and Indigenous Studies, Associate Professor of Spanish University of Texas at Austin

Luis E. Cárcamo-Huechante is a Mapuche scholar. He is currently the Director of the Program in Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS) and an Associate Professor of Spanish at The University of Texas at Austin. Between 2019 and this year, he served as a member of the Council of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA). Cárcamo-Huechante is a founding member of the Comunidad de Historia Mapuche, which is a collective of Mapuche researchers/activists based in southern Chile. In 2007, he published his first book, Tramas del mercado: imaginación económica, cultura pública y literatura en el Chile de fines del siglo veinte (Santiago: Editorial Cuarto Propio). Cárcamo-Huechante has just completed his second book, titled Indigenous Interferences: Acoustic Colonialism and Mapuche Response, which is now under contract with Duke University Press.

Don Carleton

J. R. Parten Chair in the Archives of American History and Executive Director, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History The University of Texas at Austin

Don Carleton is J. R. Parten Chair in the Archives of American History and Executive Director of the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas. Carleton has lectured extensively on historical research methods and sources, the history of American news media, and twentieth-century U.S. political history. He has authored 13 books, including Red Scare (Texas Monthly Press, 1985), which won the Texas State Historical Association’s Coral Tullis Award and A Breed So Rare: The Life of J. R. Parten, Liberal Texas Oil Man, 1896–1992 (Texas State Historical Association, 1998), which received the Texas Institute of Letters Award. In 2015, Carleton received the Texas Democracy Foundation’s Bernard Rapoport Award. Before the leading the creation of the Briscoe Center, Carleton served as founding director of the Houston Metropolitan Research Center (HMRC), an urban history archives program sponsored by Rice University, the University of Houston, and the City of Houston. He earned a Ph.D. in U.S. history from the University of Houston.

Kirsten Cather

Associate Professor of Asian Studies and Director, Center for East Asian Studies The University of Texas at Austin

Kirsten Cather is Associate Professor of Asian Studies and Director of the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Texas. Cather is a literature and film scholar who focuses on modern Japan. Her first monograph was The Art of Censorship in Postwar Japan (University of Hawai`i Press, 2012) and she has published a range of articles on censorship and suicide in journals such as the Journal of Japanese Studies, Japan Forum, Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema, and positions: Asia Critique. At the University of Texas at Austin, Cather is the Director of the Center for East Asian Studies (CEAS), an umbrella organization for scholars working on East Asia across UT. Professor Cather is the co-creator of JapanLab, which aims to develop a new template for Japanese Studies by integrating Digital Humanities across all aspects of the curriculum. Cather recently supervised a JapanLab Digital Humanities project on censorship in Japan where a team of six students created an interactive video game that includes a segment on atomic bomb censorship in Occupied Japan, including the story of Yōko Ōta, a groundbreaking figure in atomic literature whose work faced government censorship. Cather earned a Ph.D. in Modern Japanese Literature with a Designated Emphasis in Film Studies from the University of California at Berkeley.

Cooper Christiancy

Postgraduate Fellow The Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice

Cooper Christiancy is Postgraduate Fellow at the Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice, where he coordinates programming on environmental justice, peace, and human rights. He earned his J.D. from the University of Minnesota School of Law.

Austin R. Cooper

Assistant Professor of History Purdue University

Austin R. Cooper is Assistant Professor of History at Purdue University. He is a historian of international politics since 1945 with a focus on nuclear technologies. Cooper’s current book project, Saharan Fallout: French Explosions in Algeria and Nuclear Weapons in the Global Cold War, traces France’s emergence as a nuclear weapon state during the 1960s, highlighting Algerian contestation and accommodation of French nuclear testing in the Sahara Desert. His related scholarship has appeared in the Nonproliferation Review and Cold War History. Cooper is associated faculty at the Center for International Studies at SciencesPo Paris, where he collaborates with the Nuclear Knowledges research collective. He earned a Ph.D. in History and Sociology of Science from the University of Pennsylvania.

David L. Eng

Richard L. Fisher Professor of English and Faculty Director of the Program in Asian American Studies University of Pennsylvania

David L. Eng is Richard L. Fisher Professor of English and Faculty Director of the Program in Asian American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is also Professor in the Programs in Comparative Literature & Literary Theory and Gender, Sexuality & Women’s Studies. A specialist in American studies, Asian diaspora, critical race theory, psychoanalysis, and queer studies, Eng is author of Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans (co-authored with Shinhee Han, Duke, 2019), The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy (Duke, 2010), and Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Duke, 2001), along with numerous co-edited collections, including “Left of Queer” (with Jasbir Puar, Duke, 2020) and Loss: The Politics of Mourning (with David Kazanjian, California, 2003). Eng’s current book project, Reparations and the Human, explores the politics of reparations and human rights in Cold War Asia. He earned a Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of California at Berkeley.

Karen Engle

Minerva House Drysdale Regents Chair in Law and Founder and Co-director, the Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice The University of Texas School of Law

Karen Engle is Minerva House Drysdale Regents Chair in Law and Founder and Co-director of the Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice at the University of Texas at Austin. She writes on the interaction between social movements and law, particularly international human rights and humanitarian law. She is author of numerous scholarly articles and of The Grip of Sexual Violence in Conflict: Feminist Interventions in International Law (Stanford University Press, 2020) as well as The Elusive Promise of Indigenous Development: Rights, Culture, Strategy (Duke University Press, 2010), which received the Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association Section on Human Rights. She has also co-edited several books, including Beyond Inequality: Redefining the Future of Work (with Neville Hoad, forthcoming Columbia University Press). Her current projects include a prison and police abolitionist critique of international human rights law and advocacy, and an excavation of feminist Cold War peace movements. Engle has been a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Residency Fellow, a Fulbright Senior Specialist, a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and a visiting professor at Harvard Law School. She earned her J.D. magna cum laude from Harvard Law School.

Beatrice Fihn

Director Lex International

Former Executive Director International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN)

Beatrice Fihn is the former executive director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize-winning campaign coalition that works to prohibit and eliminate nuclear weapons. She led the campaign for nearly a decade and has worked to mobilize civil society throughout the development of the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, the first legally binding international agreement to comprehensively prohibit nuclear weapons with the ultimate goal being their total elimination.

Jennifer Graber

Gwyn Shive, Anita Nordan Lindsay, and Joe & Cherry Gray Professor of Religious Studies and Associate Director of the Program in Native American and Indigenous Studies The University of Texas at Austin

Jennifer Graber is Gwyn Shive, Anita Nordan Lindsay, and Joe & Cherry Gray Professor of Religious Studies and Associate Director of the Program in Native American and Indigenous Studies at the University of Texas. Graber works on Native American religions, religion and violence, and inter-religious encounters in American prisons and on the American frontier. Her new project, "Our World Renewed: Ghost Dancing Across Native North America," focuses on Native actors, sources, and epistemologies in the so-called Ghost Dance of 1890. Graber has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She earned a Ph.D. in American Religious History from Duke University.

Vanja Hamzić

Reader in Law, History and Anthropology SOAS University of London

Vanja Hamzić is Reader in Law, History and Anthropology at SOAS University of London. Hamzić’s legal, anthropological, and historical research addresses issues in human subjectivity formation—especially those related to gender, sexual, class, race, linguistic and religious difference—with the principal fieldwork sites in Pakistan, Indonesia, Senegal and Louisiana. He is also interested in, and has contributed to, current transnational debates on legal and social theory, human rights, Marxism(s), decolonial and postcolonial studies, the Cold War, feminist and queer legal theories, and the ‘archival turn’ across disciplines. Hamzić has worked as an activist and researcher with various international and civil society organisations in South and South East Asia, Europe, the Middle East and West and South Africa. He is a core faculty member of the Institute for Global Law and Policy at Harvard University and an Associate Academic Fellow of the Honourable Society of the Inner Temple. Before coming to SOAS, Hamzić held academic posts at City, University of London and King’s College London. He earned an LLM with Distinction from the University of Nottingham and a Ph.D. from King’s College London.

Neville Hoad

Associate Professor of English and Co-director, the Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice The University of Texas at Austin

Neville Hoad is Associate Professor of English and co-director of the Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice. He is also affiliated faculty with the Center for Women's and Gender Studies, the Center for African and African American Studies, and Asian-American Studies. He authored African Intimacies: Race, Homosexuality and Globalization (Minnesota, 2007) and co-edits (with Karen Martin and Graeme Reid) Sex & Politics in South Africa (Double Storey, 2005). His forthcoming book is on the literary and cultural representations of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in Sub-Saharan Africa. He earned his Ph.D. in English from Columbia University.

Rebecca Hogue

Postdoctoral Fellow Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University

Rebecca Hogue is a postdoctoral fellow at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University. Hogue writes and teaches about empire, militarization, and the environment in the Pacific Islands and Oceania. She is currently working on a book manuscript, Nuclear Archipelagos, on women's anti-nuclear arts and literature of the Pacific. Her work has been published in MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, International Affairs, Critical Ethnic Studies, and Amerasia, and is forthcoming in several edited volumes. She was co-editor of the special forum on "Transnational Nuclear Imperialisms" in the Journal of Transnational American Studies. In 2024, Hogue will join the faculty at the University of Toronto as an Assistant Professor in the Department of English. She earned a Ph.D. in English with a Designated Emphasis in Native American Studies from the University of California, Davis, where she was a Mellon/ACLS fellow.

Ivana Nikolić Hughes

Director of Frontiers of Science and Senior Lecturer in Discipline in the Department of Chemistry Columbia University

President Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Ivana Nikolić Hughes is President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and a Senior Lecturer in Chemistry at Columbia University. She is a member of the U.N. Scientific Advisory Group for the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Her work on ascertaining the radiological conditions in the Marshall Islands has been covered widely, including by the Los Angeles Times. Hughes’ writing on and advocacy for nuclear disarmament has appeared in The Nation, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, The Hill, Scientific American, The Diplomat, Truthout, Common Dreams, Transcend Media Service, and elsewhere. She holds a B.S. with Honors from Caltech and a Ph.D. from Stanford University, both in Chemical Engineering .

Bruce J. Hunt

Professor of History The University of Texas at Austin

Bruce J. Hunt is a Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. He is a historian of science who studies the development of electrical science and technology in nineteenth century Britain, with a particular focus on the life and work of James Clerk Maxwell. Hunt also takes in interest in the history of nuclear weapons and the Atomic Scientists’ Movement and has long taught a course on “The History of the Atomic Bomb” at UT-Austin. He is the author of three books and has published more than twenty articles on nineteenth century electrical theory and practice. Hunt was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2015. In 2018, he delivered George Sarton Memorial Lecture in the History and Philosophy of Science at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and in 2021 he received the Houck Award from the Antique Wireless Association for his most recent book, Imperial Science: Cable Telegraphy and Electrical Physics in the Victorian British Empire. He earned his Ph.D. in the History of Science from Johns Hopkins University.

Anaïs Maurer

Assistant Professor of French and Comparative Literature Rutgers University

Faculty Associate Center for Nuclear Studies, Columbia University

Anaïs Maurer is Assistant Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Rutgers University and a Faculty Associate at Columbia University’s Center for Nuclear Studies. Her research foregrounds how Pacific artists and activists have resisted environmental racism in Oceania, from the genocidal epidemics of earlier centuries to the contemporary period of nuclear colonialism and carbon imperialism. Maurer’s first monograph, Pacific Stories from Nuclear Survivors to Climate Activists, is forthcoming with Duke University Press. Maurer was co-editor of the special forum on "Transnational Nuclear Imperialisms" in the Journal of Transnational American Studies, and co-editor/co-translator of the special issue on "New Directions in Contemporary Mā'ohi Literature" in the Australian Journal of French Studies. Her work has been published in various academic journals and featured in media such as the BBC and Nesia Daily. She earned a Ph.D. in French and Comparative Literature from Columbia University.

Hirokazu Miyazaki

Kay Davis Professor of Anthropology Northwestern University

Hirokazu Miyazaki is Kay Davis Professor of Anthropology at Northwestern University. His research interests include sociocultural anthropology, economic anthropology, nuclear weapons, nuclear energy, the Pacific Islands (mainly Fiji), Japan, and the U.S. His current work investigates city diplomacy for nuclear disarmament, including global efforts by mayors, city officials, civil leaders, and city residents to influence nuclear policy and related city-level actions, such as ordinances, resolutions, and proclamations, in U.S. cities. His published work includes the edited volume Nuclear Compensation: Lessons from Fukushima (2022) and The Economy of Hope (co-authored with Richard Swedberg, 2017). Before joining Northwestern, Miyazaki was Professor of Anthropology at Cornell, where he served as the Director of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies from 2015–2018. He earned a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the Australian National University.

Vasuki Nesiah

Professor of Practice NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study

Vasuki Nesiah is Professor of Practice at the NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study and faculty director of the Gallatin Global Fellowship in Human Rights. Nesiah has published on the history and politics of human rights, humanitarianism, international criminal law, reparations, global feminism, and decolonization. She is a founding member of Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) and is currently co-editing TWAIL: A Handbook (forthcoming); her other forthcoming book projects include International Conflict Feminism (University of Pennsylvania Press) and Reading the Ruins: Colonialism, Slavery, and International Law. Nesiah was appointed to the Jacob K. Javits Visiting Professorship at NYU (Spring 2022) and received both the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching and the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Faculty Award from NYU in 2020. She earned a J.D. from Harvard Law School and an S.J.D. in International Law from Harvard Law School.

Abena Dove Osseo-Asare

Professor of History The University of Texas at Austin

Abena Dove Osseo-Asare is Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. She is a faculty associate of the Health and Society major in the College of Liberal Arts and holds a courtesy appointment in the Department of Population Health at Dell Medical School. Osseo-Asare is historian of medicine and science. Her book Atomic Junction: Nuclear Power in Africa after Independence (Cambridge University Press, October 2019) examines the history of Ghana's nuclear program since the 1960s and the role of Ghanaian scientists in extending radiation protection services. It received the 2020 Martin A. Klein Prize in African History from the American Historical Association. Osseo-Asare’s first book, Bitter Roots: The Search for Healing Plants in Africa (University of Chicago Press, 2014), was recognized with the 2015 Melville J. Herskovits Prize in African Studies, the American Historical Association Pacific Coast Branch 2015 Book Award, and the 2014 Choice Magazine Academic Titles Book Award. Osseo-Asare has received awards from the National Science Foundation, Fulbright Foundation, Ford Foundation, and Hellman Family Foundation. Before joining the faculty at UT, she taught in the History Department at the University of California, Berkeley. She earned her Ph.D. in the History of Science from Harvard University.

Eiko Otake

Eiko Otake is a movement–based interdisciplinary artist. Raised in Japan and a resident of New York since 1976, she worked for 42 years as Eiko & Koma, receiving commissions from the Whitney Museum, the Walker Art Center, and MoMA, and major awards including the MacArthur Fellowship and the Samuel H. Scripps American Dance Festival Award. Since 2014 Eiko has worked as a solo artist, collaborating with a diverse range of artists. Eiko has performed in many locations of post-nuclear meltdown Fukushima for her multi-year work A Body in Fukushima, her collaboration with historian and photographer William Johnston. The project produced many exhibitions, screenings, lectures, and performances, as well as a publication of a photography book of the same title that includes artists’ essays.

Bedi Racule

Climate Justice Enabler Pacific Council of Churches

Co-coordinator Nuclear Truth Project

Bedi Racule hails from the Marshall Islands and Pohnpei in the Federated States of Micronesia but lives in Suva, Fiji. Among her many roles, she serves as a Climate Justice Enabler at the Pacific Council of Churches, Co-coordinator of the Nuclear Truth Project and advisor to grassroots nuclear justice organization MISA4thePacific. Her organizing work weaves together nuclear legacies, ocean stewardship, and climate justice. In August 2023, Bedi's poem, “See you Soon, Lagoon”, showcasing tremendous loss due to nuclear testing, was produced as a video and launched at the Pacific Islands Forum on the International Day Against Nuclear Weapons.

Annelise Riles

Professor of Law and Anthropology and Associate Provost for Global Affairs Northwestern University

Annelise Riles is Professor of Law and Anthropology and Associate Provost for Global Affairs at Northwestern University. Riles has conducted legal and anthropological research in China, Japan, and the Pacific and speaks Chinese, Japanese, French, and Fijian. She has published on a wide variety of topics, including comparative law, conflict of laws, financial regulation, and central banking. Her first book, The Network Inside Out (2000), won the American Society of International Law’s Certificate of Merit for 2000-2002. Riles teaching posts have included positions at Cornell University, the London School of Economics, the University of Tokyo, and Yale University. Whilst at Cornell, she received the Anneliese Maier Award for lifetime achievement across the social sciences and humanities. She earned a J.D. from Harvard Law School and a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge.

Hebatalla Taha

Associate Senior Lecturer Centre for Advanced Middle Eastern Studies and the Department of Political Science, Lund University

Hebatalla Taha is Associate Senior Lecturer at Lund University's Centre for Advanced Middle Eastern Studies and the Department of Political Science. Her work lies at the intersection of political economy and security in the modern Middle East, particularly Israel/Palestine. Taha’s research on nuclear histories and technologies in the Middle East has been published in Third World Quarterly, International Affairs, and Global Affairs. Her article “Atomic Aesthetics: Gender, Visualization, and Popular Culture in Egypt” won the 2023 International Affairs Early Career Prize. Taha received a 2023-2024 Critical Nuclear Weapons Scholarship grant from the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons for her project “The Nuclear Age from Below in the Middle East.” She is an affiliated scholar at the Center for International Studies (CERI) at SciencesPo Paris, where she collaborates with the Nuclear Knowledges research collective. She earned a DPhil from the University of Oxford.

Ella Weber

Research Fellow, Nuclear Princeton Princeton University

Ella Weber is an undergraduate student (Class of 2025) studying Public Policy and International Affairs at Princeton University. A tribal citizen of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara (MHA) Nation from Crookston, Minnesota, Weber serves as a Research Fellow at Nuclear Princeton, and her research interests include education and public health. As a student at Princeton, she became involved in mapping and ethnographic projects studying the presence of nuclear weapons across the United States. Weber is the host of an investigative podcast called “The Missiles on Our Rez,” produced by Scientific American magazine in partnership with the Princeton University Program on Science and Global Security and Nuclear Princeton. The podcast explores the histories, experiences, and perspectives of residents on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation, the only U.S. reservation on which nuclear weapons are stored.

Will Wilson

Associate Professor of Studio Art The University of Texas at Austin

Will Wilson is Associate Professor of Studio Art at the University of Texas. He is a Diné photographer and trans-customary artist whose art projects center around the continuation and transformation of customary Indigenous cultural practice. His project “Connecting the Dots” is a photographic counter-survey of the over 500 Abandoned Uranium Mines (AUMs) located on the Navajo Nation. Wilson won the Native American Fine Art Fellowship from the Eiteljorg Museum in 2007, the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award for Sculpture in 2010, and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant for Photography in 2016. In 2017, Wilson received the New Mexico Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts. He was the Doran Artist in Residence at the Yale University Art Gallery in 2020 and has held visiting professorships at the Institute of American Indian Arts (1999-2000), Oberlin College (2000-01), and the University of Arizona (2006-08). Before joining the UT faculty, Wilson was Program Head of Photography at Santa Fe Community College. He earned an M.F.A. in Photography from the University of New Mexico.

Ian Zabarte

Secretary of State Western Shoshone National Council of the Western Bands of the Shoshone Nation of Indians

Secretary Native Community Action Council

Principal Man Ian Zabarte is Secretary of State of the Western Shoshone National Council of the Western Bands of the Shoshone Nation of Indians and Secretary of the Native Community Action Council, a "party with standing" in the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission Atomic Safety Licensing Board Panel licensing of the proposed Yucca Mountain high-level nuclear waste repository. Mr. Zabarte became an advocate for his family and other Americans living DOWNWIND from the Nevada National Security Site, where the US occupies Shoshone property, secretly testing 928 nuclear weapons of mass destruction without the consent of the Shoshone people. He was formerly a rancher, managing horses and cattle, when the US Bureau of Land Management blamed the Shoshone for destruction of the land caused by radioactive fallout from nuclear weapons tests, destroying the Shoshone ranching economy contemplated by the treaty. Mr. Zabarte watched his family suffer the devastating adverse health effects of radiation exposure to his family, people, and land, and he has spent decades advocating for the end of nuclear weapons testing and for the Radiation Compensation Act, passed in 1990. Mr. Zabarte seeks creation of the treaty-guaranteed reservation and equal protection of his land and people from extractive mineral exploitation and relief from the health consequences of nuclear weapons testing.