Fellow 2023/2024Anaïs Maurer
Fellowship Term: 01/2024 – 07/2024
Anaïs is an Assistant Professor at Rutgers University. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2018. Prior to that, she earned an M.A. from Paris-Sorbonne University and Tulane University and a B.A. from Preparatory School St. Sernin in Toulouse, France. She also holds a Baccalaureate from Paul Gauguin High School in Pape’ete, French Polynesia.
In addition to her role at Rutgers University, she is an Affiliate Faculty at the K=1 Project in the Center for Nuclear Studies at Columbia University and previously served as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Colby College.
She has a forthcoming book titled “Pacific Post-Apocalypse: Stories from Nuclear Survivors and Climate Activists,” which will be published by Duke University Press in 2024.
Some of her selected journal articles include:
- “Bonded by the Bomb: Asian-Oceanian Alliances against French Nuclear Colonialism” in the special issue of Critical Ethnic Studies titled “Center-to-Center Relationalities: At the Nexus of Pacific Islands Studies and Trans-Pacific Studies.”
- “Pacific Women Antinuclear Poetry: Centering Indigenous Knowledges” in the special issue of International Affairs titled “Feminist Interrogations of Global Nuclear Politics,” co-authored with Rebecca H. Hogue.
- “Snaring the Nuclear Sun: Decolonial Ecologies in Titaua Peu’s Mutismes: E ’ore te vāvā” in The Contemporary Pacific.
- “Océanitude: repenser le tribalisme occidental au prisme des nationalismes océaniens” in Francosphères.
- “Nukes and Nudes: Counter-Hegemonic Identities in the Nuclearized Pacific” in French Studies.
Her research focuses on topics related to nuclear studies, post-apocalyptic narratives, climate activism, decolonization, and indigenous knowledges in the context of the Pacific region.
Aita Atomi : Mā’ohi Artists against Nuclear Colonialism
With a collective payload hundreds of times that the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, French nuclear tests constitute an apocalyptic event that ushered the end of a world in Mā’ohi Nui. In a new monograph entitled ’Aita Atomi, Anaïs Maurer retraces the half-century of Mā’ohi artistic resistance to the bomb, from the 1960s to the present. Despite censorship, political pressures, and economic coercion, antinuclear resistance flourished in the interstices of creative expression afforded by songs, dances, drawings, novels, poems, plays, and graffiti. Exploring an extensive, transdisciplinary, and multilingual corpus of antinuclear art, Maurer argues that Mā’ohi artists retrieve the traces left by the most marginalized victims of nuclear colonialism, by exposing the gendered consequences of fallout and giving a voice to the stolen generation of stillborn babies. Refusing to forget this tragic history, antinuclear art offers a cathartic space through which to express the ongoing emotions associated with half a century of state lies, medical negligence, and environmental racism.