Nuclear things provide a powerful vantage point onto problems at the intersections between biology and politics, state and private power, technologies and expert knowledges, and the distributive injustices of technogenic pollution. Historians of science have used nuclear things to trace how these dynamics have unfolded in the past even as the enduring residues of these histories continue to cause harm today. These qualities make nuclear history fertile ground for thinking critically about the epistemic constitution of the history of science. This talk will draw on my conversations and engagements with community members, activists, and experts working to remedy ongoing nuclear injustices to reflect on the problems and prospects of engaged history of science. What does it mean to write pasts of enduring technogenic harm? What do historians bring to community collaborations? What are the distinctions between history and advocacy? What is at stake when the boundary between these domains fades?

Mary X. Mitchell is a lawyer and historian whose work centers on the intersections of science and technology with law and environmental social movements in the nuclear era. Focusing on radiological risk, her research examines the production of environmental inequality in the United States and transnationally. She is completing a book about the transnational legal history of the United States' above-ground nuclear weapons blasting in Indigenous lands and waters in the Marshall Islands. She uses legal texts, claims, and controversies over blasting to trace how sovereignty changed after World War II. A second in-progress book manuscript examines the history of US and international legal regimes governing offsite damage from nuclear reactor disasters. Mitchell is an assistant professor in the Federated Department of History at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and Rutgers Newark. Before becoming a historian, she practiced law in Pennsylvania, served as a law clerk to Judge Anthony J. Scirica of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, and was the associate director for intellectual property at the University of Pennsylvania.