Pierre-Elliot (Peter) Caswell

Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies

Education

Ph.D. Cornell University
M.A. University of Minnesota – Twin Cities
B.A. Université Michel de Montaigne – Bordeaux III

Research and Teaching Interests

Critical Race Studies, Environmental Humanities, Indigenous Studies, Nuclear Culture, 20th and 21st
French and Francophone Literature, Art History and Visual Culture

Biography

Pierre-Elliot Caswell is a literary and cultural studies scholar. His current research project, titled Phantom Limbs of the Republican Body: Colonialism, Race, and the Politics of Memory in France, examines the evolution of France’s treatment of race and colonialism in French laws and discourses since the 19^th century, as well as the intellectual, literary, and artistic responses that such discourses have provoked in the present. One of the aims of this project is not only to account for the ways in which whiteness and colonialism have contributed to the development of Republicanism in France, but also to emphasize the continued importance of anticolonial and antiracist thought through the contemporary work of metropolitan Afro-diasporic writers, artists, and activists who, over the past twenty years, have endeavored to highlight the paradoxes of Republican ideology.

In parallel, Prof. Caswell’s work also investigates the material and discursive intimacies between colonialism, modernity, and environmental racism. In particular, this aspect of his research focuses on the Republican roots of atomic modernity in France, its racial and settler colonial entanglements in French-occupied Polynesia, and Indigenous struggles against nuclear imperialism in the age of climate change. In 2022, he created the Digital Humanities platform “Nuclear Cartographies” (available at: https://nuclearcartographies.com/) — a project that maps and visually represents the French atomic circuit through four different layers: atomic tests, nuclear reactors, nuclear waste repositories, and uranium mines.

These interests inform the classes he teaches. In “Tahiti and the Colonial Imagination” (Fall 2024) for example, students explore the complex and multifaceted representations of Tahiti and its inhabitants by engaging a wide range of artifacts, including 18th-century philosophical reflections, 19th-century paintings, and contemporary novels written by Indigenous Francophone writers. Likewise, “The Republic and Its Doubles” (Spring 2025) focuses on the relationship between colonialism, racism, and the French Republican imaginary by considering a wide array of questions: How have race and colonialism shaped the Republican narrative that is so important to French identity today? Can France claim to be a universalist country considering its racist and colonial past/present? How have literature, theory, and other forms of cultural production engaged these questions?

 

Representative Publications

“Réciter le temps écologique: Mythes et mémoires du colonialisme nucléaire français.” Special issue “Migrations et environnements: Convergences et divergences du postcolonialisme et de l’écocritique.” Nouvelles Études Francophones, vol. 38, no. 2 (2023): pp. 71–87.

“‘A Ghost in the System’: French Nuclear Colonialism and the Haunting of Republicanism.” French Cultural Studies, vol. 33, no. 4 (2022): pp. 301–314, doi: 10.1177/09571558221089515.

“On Living Unhinged.” Science Fiction Studies Journal, vol. 47, no 3 (November 2020): pp. 333–335.