Julien Néel is a PhD candidate in the French department at Yale, where he is also completing certificates in Environmental Humanities, Library and Archive Studies, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. His research interests include ecocriticism, infrastructure studies, queer ecologies, thing theory and material culture, new materialisms, and nuclear colonialism in 20th and 21st-century Francophone and Japanese literature and film.
His dissertation, “Infrastructure, mon amour. Infrastructural Intimacies and Energy Independence in post-1945 Francophone and Japanese Literature and Film,” seeks to comprehend the affective and material responses to environmental disturbances caused by so-called “green” or “clean” energy infrastructures like dams and nuclear facilities. His work aims to deconstruct myths of energy independence to shed light on multi-scalar networks of intimacies.
Julien 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. His work appeared or is forthcoming in Fabula LhT and SubStance.