Stephanie L Palazzo Assistant Director, Wrting Center

Stephanie Palazzo is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Franklin and Marshall College. She works at the intersection of medical anthropology, environmental studies, gender theory, and feminist science and technology studies, with a focus on post-nuclear United States.

Her current book project, Domesticating Uncertainty: The Nuclear Afterlives of Three Mile Island, is set in her home community of Central Pennsylvania and analyzes the social, economic, biological, and environmental fallout of the US nuclear industry as it is typified through the life cycle of the presently decommissioning Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant (TMI). In 1979, TMI suffered a loss of coolant accident that drew national attention to the small, rural community hosting it; today, it is undergoing its decommissioning, a plant closure spanning sixty years and presently occurring against a backdrop of receding local concern. Drawing on 24 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Central Pennsylvania with residents, employees, and self-described “reluctant activists,” she tracks the the sociocultural process through which Americans come to feel at home with nuclear technology, often in ways that occlude the fast and slow forms of violence it engenders across local and planetary scales.

Stephanie received her PhD from the University of Chicago in June 2023 and her BA from Franklin & Marshall College in 2014. Her work has been supported by the Wenner Gren Foundation.

For more information on her research, teaching, and writing, visit stephaniepalazzo.com