Pierre-Elliot Caswell

Biography

Pierre-Elliot Caswell is a literary and cultural studies scholar, whose work investigates the material and discursive intimacies between colonialism, race, and memory. One aspect of his research focuses on the Republican roots of atomic modernity in France; its environmental, racial, and settler colonial entanglements in Oceania; and Indigenous struggles against nuclear imperialism in the age of climate change. In 2022, he created the Digital Humanities platform “Nuclear Cartographies” (available at: https://nuclearcartographies.com/) — a project that maps and visually represents the French atomic circuit through four different layers: atomic tests, nuclear reactors, nuclear waste repositories, and uranium mines. His most recent article, “Réciter le temps écologique: Mythes et mémoires du colonialisme nucléaire français,” explores how storytelling processes, particularly through the work of contemporary artist Alexander Lee, might help us redress erasures in the wake of nuclear colonialism in French-occupied Polynesia.