Aanchal Saraf

Aanchal Saraf is from Houston, Texas. She earned a BA from Brown University in Geography and Ethnic Studies. Her undergraduate research was an ethnographic account of Kanaka Maoli protesting construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope on the sacred summit of Mauna Kea in Hawai’i. Her dissertation, Atomic Afterlives, Pacific Archives: Unsettling the Geographies and Science of Nuclear Colonialism in the Marshall Islands and Hawaiʻi, is an account of US Cold War imperialism and nuclear colonialism from the vantage point of the Marshall Islands and the Marshallese nuclear diaspora in Hawai‘i. Through an interdisciplinary approach that combines archival research with ethnographic interviews and visual and cultural analysis, she examines the role of science, anthropology, and militarism in the rise of U.S. global power after World War II, as well as Pacific Islander cultural production, oral histories, and activism that reveal and contest nuclear colonialism’s ongoing legacies. Her work is supported by the National Science Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the American Council of Learned Societies.