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.
Sunday July 19, 2026, 2PM
Arya and Hamid Eshghi Forum
In this informal talk, 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.