The Consortium is delighted to announce that Aimee Slaughter has been awarded the inaugural Emanuel Fellowship for independent and non-academic scholars. With experience as a museum curator and educator, Dr. Slaughter has been involved in advancing both academic and public understanding of the history of science. Her project, Making Atomic History in New Mexico, brings a fresh perspective, and promises distinctive and substantive contributions to the history of the nuclear era.
This project focuses on how New Mexicans themselves have created understandings of their place in nuclear history, specifically highlighting who has been included and excluded in that history-making, and how understandings of the present and future are placed within the context of atomic legacies. These local histories have international meanings, and can be interrogated along lines of memory, identity, and popular understandings of nuclear legacies and of history. How have New Mexican voices created histories that have more commonly been constructed by outsiders? How did the uncertainties of the Cold War affect local history-making by scientific institutions and nuclear heritage sites? New Mexico's unique and meaningful atomic histories illuminate fraught and nuanced interrelationships within a nuclear landscape.