Hester Baer and Michele M. Mason are the leads of a multi-year, interdisciplinary, collaborative research and teaching project that addresses the urgent question of nuclear futures in an era characterized by environmental degradation, economic and social precarity, and an emergent “Cold War.” Grounded in the participants’ disciplinary training in Japanese and German studies, the project attends to the diverging and converging perspectives of two national cultures with long traditions of nuclear abolition movements, shaped by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the legacies of World War II and the first Cold War, and the devastation wrought by nuclear accidents in Chernobyl and Fukushima. Elaborating the literary, cinematic, and aesthetic production around nuclear disaster, specific contours of local and transnational activism, and innovative policy advocacy in Japan and Germany, the project facilitates generative dialogue on and new understandings of the stakes of nuclear debates. Read more in their article in UMD’s The Faculty Voice.
Digital Platform
The platform will serve as an open-access venue for the presentation of our research, a repository of project-related information, and a means of connecting and facilitating communication among scholars, activists, and survivors. We envision the inclusion on the site of data visualizations, a multimedia presentation space, archived historical documents, a research blog, and a public forum. Initial development of the site will take place in conjunction with the two courses we will co-teach in connection with the initiative, which will integrate project-based digital humanities components.
Graduate Seminar
Hester Baer and Michele Mason are currently co-teaching a graduate seminar, “Nuclear Futures: Theorizing the Environmental Humanities for the Post-Fukushima Age.” This seminar interrogates the concept of futurity in the context of environmental activism and artistic engagement with atomic issues from 1945 to the present. [Read more]
Research Workshop
A workshop, Nuclear Futures in the Post-Fukushima Age, will be held at the University of Maryland on April 11 & 12, 2019, with scholarly presentations and a film screening of Doris Dörrie’s Grüße aus Fukushima (Fukushima Mon Amour, 2016). All events are open to the public.
Edited Volume
An edited volume, also titled Nuclear Futures in the Post-Fukushima Age, will include both theoretical contributions and case studies that contribute to our understanding of nuclear futures in the aesthetic and political context of transnational German-Japanese relations. This book will include the translation of Yōko Tawada’s short work entitled “The Animals’ Tower of Babel.”