Alison Sperling rethinks and interrogates popular framings resilience and adaptability through her research Nuclear Afterlives. She hopes to challenge the ways we think about toxic bodies and environments in an age where toxicity is not the exception but the rule. What do these (relatively) new forms of radioactive bodies (human and nonhuman, alive and not) enable us to understand about embodiment in the Anthropocene? How does the temporality of nuclear contamination reframe ecological time and potentially refuse the teleology of reproductive futurity?
Alison Sperling is an IPODI Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Zentrum für Interdisziplinäre Frauen und Geschlechterforschung at the Technische Universität Berlin, an Affiliate Research Fellow at the ICI Berlin, and teaches theory at St. Joost’s Ecology Futures Program. She works on 20th and 21st century American fiction with a focus on the science-fictional in literature and in the arts, feminist and queer theory, and the Anthropocene. She is currently at work on her first monograph, Weird Modernisms, as well as a second project on nuclear ecologies and contemporary fiction and art.