Ryo Morimoto is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology, the Richard Stockton Bicentennial Preceptor, and a first-generation scholar from Japan. Morimoto’s ethnographically driven research in post-fallout coastal Fukushima explores the latent impacts of settler colonialism in the United States on global, historical engagements with nuclear things and on contemporary and future ecologies and generations. He traces the material, technoscientific, political, cultural transmutations and local and planetary flows of natural elements like uranium, artificial radioisotopes, nuclear bombs, radiation-emitting medical devices, nuclear energy, and nuclear waste. Through his scholarship, Morimoto aims to build coalitions between Fukushima residents in Japan and the Indigenous Communities across the globe, both of which have been subjugated by radioactive world-making.

At Princeton, Morimoto teaches an Anthropology and Environmental Studies course entitled “Nuclear Things and Toxic Colonization.” In the course, the students explore concepts such as extractivism, radioactive colonialism, and sacrificial zone and issues like the ongoing climate crisis and nuclear waste management. In Spring 2023, Morimoto is teaching Anthropology, Environmental Studies, and American Studies course based on the Nuclear Princeton Project.