An activist wears a T-shirt that reads ‘Would they? (on the front) Do it in Paris’ to protest the French nuclear testing at the Mururoa Atoll, in September 1995.
RESCHEDULED: Thursday September 10, 2026, 5–7PM
Arya and Hamid Eshghi Forum
In this informal happy-hour talk, organized in conjunction with our summer exhibition Strategies of Assembly, SFU historian Roxanne Panchasi revisits images of the mid-1990s local-to-global protests against the French bomb, three decades after France’s final round of experimental nuclear detonations in Mā'ohi Nui/“French Polynesia.”
Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at SFU who specializes in France and empire after 1945. She is the author of Future Tense: The Culture of Anticipation in France Between the Wars (Cornell University Press, 2009), and the founder of "New Books in French Studies, " a podcast channel on the New Books Network that she hosted for over a decade. Her work explores a wide range of themes: memory and futurity; military and environmental culture and crisis; history pedagogy; experimental and documentary cinema; and popular music. Her research on the "French bomb" in empire has appeared in History of the Present, Jadaliyya, French Fiction and Film for Scholars of France, and Apocalyptica: the Journal of the Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies.