Aanchal Saraf’s current book project theorizes the “colonial fallout” of US nuclear weapons testing in the Marshall Islands, tracing fallout as material and metaphor across space and time in order to ascertain its material, ideological, geopolitical, and affective endurances. To get at the contours of such a diffuse legacy, the project works across official and submerged archives, Asian American and Pacific Islander cultural production and performance, and ethnographies of nuclear displacement as narrated by ri-Ṃajeļ on the Big Island of Hawai‘i.

Aanchal Saraf is an assistant professor of cultural studies at the Pratt Institute. She researches and teaches about US empire in Asia and the Pacific, with particular attention to how militarism and science co-constitute raced and gendered bodies, knowledges, and ecologies. Her research interests include cold war visual and material cultures, technoscience, fashion, environmental humanities, and feminist and queer theory. Saraf’s creative and scholarly works have appeared or are forthcoming in Literary Hub, CNN Opinions, Amerasia, Journal of Asian American Studies, Journal of Transnational American Studies, and Women & Performance, among other publications.