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Australia is both home to the world’s oldest continuous cultures, as well as one third of all the known uranium on Earth. Australia is therefore a critical site for understanding the nuclear fuel cycle as future cultural and environmental heritage.︎

Principal investigator: N.A.J. Taylor︎ 
Sponsors: Deakin University, Killam Trusts, and The University of British Columbia
Funding: $350,000 (internal, incl. salary)
Key output: a digital humanities project in development︎


This project ask how and why the archives of environmentally remediated uranium mining and contaminated sites are managed over immediate, intermediate, and possibly even far-future (e.g. 10,000 or more years) timeframes. It does so by engaging STEM-based collaborators from Environmental Engineering with both knowledge and practical experience of the legal and regulatory landscape for archiving records, knowledges and memory (RK&M) relating to uranium extraction, as well as its contamination, remediation and waste management in the Australian and international contexts.︎

Principal investigator: N.A.J. Taylor︎ 
Co-investigators: Chu Xia Lin (Deakin), David Lowe (Deakin), Emily Potter (Deakin), Paul Brown (UNSW) and Gavin Mudd (RMIT)
Sponsor: Deakin University’s Science and Society Network︎
Funding: $3,000 (internal)
Key output: a literature review for an Australia Reearch Council grant proposal


The Atomic Photographers Guild is the pre-eminent collective dedicated to visualising all aspects of the nuclear age. Formed in 1987 by Robert Del Tredici, the Guild has since amassed an archive of photographic negatives and prints from more than forty photographers across seven decades. The collection begins with the world’s two first atomic photographers: Berlyn Brixner, the United States’ government’s head photographer of the Manhattan Project, and Yoshito Matsushige, the only photographer to document the atomic destruction of Hiroshima from inside that city on August 6, 1945. Despite the significance of the Guild’s archive, the collection has yet to be formally catalogued and digitised.︎

Principal investigator: N.A.J. Taylor︎
Institutional partner: Atomic Photographers Guild︎
Sponsor: Australian Academy of the Humanities︎
Funding: $2,000 (external)
Key output: cataloguing and digitisation of the Guild’s Yoshito Matsushige, Beryl Brixner, and Robert Del Tredici archive︎
Oceania Project
2020-

Under contract to Palgrave Macmillan’s global outreach programme, this sole-authored book project asks what role visual images and artefacts play in the American, British and French nuclear imaginary, but also for the enduring experience and representation of nuclear colonialism in Oceania. Doing so not only remedies the relative neglect of Oceania in the nuclear literature despite its central role in the development of the American, British and French nuclear weapon capabilities, but also contributes to the broader “visual turn” currently underway in International Relations by offering a better scholarly understanding of one of the discipline’s central concerns: nuclear security and survival.︎

Principal investigator: N.A.J. Taylor︎ 
Key output: a monograph under advanced contract Palgrave Macmillan



I began making photographs of Australian uranium mining sites in the early 2000s whilst working as an applied ethicist in the institutional investment industry, although I did not begin exhibiting or publishing my nuclear photography until 2009. The process of making photographic images, and the decision to publish some of them, has increasingly informed how I both comprehend and communicate the spatial and temporal enormity of nuclear harms. To date fieldwork of nuclear sites has been conducted in Australia, Belgium, England, Estonia, France, Germany, Finland, Iran, Israel, Scotland, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United States.︎

Principal investigator: N.A.J. Taylor︎
Institutional partner/s: Atomic Photographers Guild︎
Key output: an award-winning essay︎