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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/s: N.A.J. Taylor︎Sponsors: Deakin University, Killam Trusts, and The University of British Columbia
Funding: $350,000 (internal, incl. salary)
Key output/s: a living digital humanities project︎ and a series of scholarly publications 



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︎

Richard Routley/Sylvan is widely regarded as having pioneered the academic subfield of Environmental Philosophy. Less well known are his contributions to nuclear thought which were mostly self-published from his office in the 1970s and 80s. Through archival research, this project performs the most thoroughgoing investigation into Sylvan’s nuclear ethics and politics ever undertaken.︎

Principal investigator: N.A.J. Taylor︎ Institutional partner: John Denis Fryer Memorial Library of Australian Literature︎
Sponsors: The University of Queensland and Deakin University’s Centre for Contemporary Histories
 Funding: $20,000 (external + in kind) + $7,500 (internal)
Key outputs: a monograph and companion Omeka digital exhibition︎

Oceania Project
On hold

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. I am a active member of the Advisory Board of the Atomic Photographers Guild which was established in 1987.︎

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