Aanchal Saraf
Biography
Aanchal Saraf researches and teaches about US empire in Asia and the Pacific, with 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. Her current book project theorizes the “colonial fallout” of U.S. nuclear weapons testing in the Marshall Islands, working 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’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.
Education
PhD, American Studies, Yale University (2023)
BA, Geography and Ethnic Studies, Brown University (2016)
Publications and Projects
Selected Publications
(forthcoming) “‘This Poison Broke the World’: Narratives of Nuclear Displacement on Hawai‘i Island,” Amerasia Journal, special issue “Between Refuge and Refuse: New Mediums/Methods for Theorizing Refuge(e) Environments”
2025 “Island Worlds,” Journal of Asian American Studies, special issue on Gary Okihiro 28.1: 51-59.
2023 “Oppenheimer’s Not Your Daddy,” with Rebecca Hogue, CNN
2023 “Islands Dropped from a Basket (after Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner),” Visual and New Media Review, Fieldsights
2022 “ginger in case of turbulence,” Fruit Journal, Issue 5: Ingestion
2022 “Feeling Seen in Sort Of: On Queer Feelings and the Company of Others,” Literary Hub
2020 “Aloha Made: The Circulation of Empire, Plastic, and the Visceral in Bishop Museum’s ‘Unreal Hawai’i’,” Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, special issue “Performances of Contingency: Feminist Relationality and Asian American Studies After the Institution” 30.1: 1-22.
2020 “‘We’d Rather Eat Rocks’: Contesting the Thirty Meter Telescope in a Struggle Over Science and Sovereignty in Hawai‘i,” Journal of Transnational American Studies, special forum on American Territorialities 11.1: 151-175.
2019 “Global Racial Capitalism and the Asian American Zombie in Ling Ma’s Severance,” Studies of the Fantastic, conference special issue “‘No More Room in Hell: A Half-Century of Undead Media’” 7: 12-23.
2019 “The Sakman, a Guamanian Outrigger Canoe,” Asian American Feminist Collective: Solidarity, Politicizing, Talking Back