Julien Néel

Julien Néel received a double BA in English and French literatures and an MA in comparative literature from Sorbonne Université, as well as an MA in arts, languages, and literatures from the EHESS. An Environmental Humanities fellow at the Whitney Humanities Center, he focuses on ecocriticism, infrastructure studies, affect theory, queer ecologies, new materialisms and nuclear colonialism in 20th and 21st-century French and Francophone literatures. He is also interested in Japanese literature of that same period. His research deals with the affective and material responses to environmental disturbances and vulnerabilities caused by infrastructures like dams and nuclear facilities. His examples debunk the myth of energy independence to shed light on multi-scalar networks of intimacies.