Nuclear Anthropologist.

I am an anthropologist who explores how nuclear institutions reckon with deep time, build governance architectures, and sustain continuity into unknown futures.

During the Biden administration, I served as a Senior Program Manager in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy, where I led the Consent-Based Siting Consortia: twelve project teams—drawn from academia, nonprofits, and the private sector—awarded $24 million to advance public engagement and build community capacity for siting spent nuclear fuel facilities.

My book Deep Time Reckoning is an ethnographic study of how Finland’s Onkalo nuclear waste safety case experts pondered the limits of knowledge as they envisaged far-future societies, bodies, and ecosystems. My second book, Longstorming, explores how temporal countercultures—from 10,000-year clockmakers to nuclear energy technologists, Indigenous knowledge keepers, and wilderness trail crews—can ignite planetary imagination beyond digital immediacy.

Prior to my federal service, I was MacArthur Assistant Research Professor at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs. I have held fellowships at the University of Southern California, the University of British Columbia, and Cornell’s Society for the Humanities. My work has been supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the European Research Council, and the Berggruen Institute.

I am currently a Senior Research Fellow at Tampere University in Finland. From 2027 to 2030, I will join the Turku Institute for Advanced Studies as a Senior Research Fellow. I hold a PhD from Cornell University and an MSc from the London School of Economics.

My books are published by MIT Press, and my research has appeared in American Ethnologist, Social Studies of Science, Physics Today, Nuclear Technology, Science & Technology Studies, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Nature Geoscience, and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

My work has been featured by the BBC, Scientific American, Washington Post, NPR, Science, Forbes, The Hill, Psyche, Public Radio International, Helsingin Sanomat, Süddeutsche Zeitung, ABC Radio Australia, and other outlets.

You can reach me at vincent.ialenti@tuni.fi