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Team
Benoît Pelopidas
benoit.pelopidas@sciencespo.fr
Prof. Benoît Pelopidas (PhD) founded the program Nuclear Knowledges and holds the chair of excellence in security studies at CERI (Sciences Po). He is also an affiliate of the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at Stanford University and has been a frequent visiting fellow at Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security.
In France, Nuclear Knowledges is the first scholarly research program on the nuclear phenomenon, which is fully independent and transparent on its funding sources.
He has been awarded four international prizes for his research. In 2017, he has been awarded one of the most competitive EU grants: an ERC Starting Grant (1,5 million € over five years) on nuclear weapons choices.
He focuses on the construction of knowledge about nuclear weapons, their institutional, conceptual, imaginal and memorial underpinnings. Conceptually, he elaborates nuclear vulnerability beyond its material and strategic dimensions. Empirically, Benoit’s focus is on nuclear “close calls”, crisis management and French nuclear history.
Over the last seven years, he has been engaging with policymaking elites in the US and Europe as well as civil society groups to advocate innovative nuclear disarmament and arms control policies.
Since 2013, he has been coordinating a team of 13 international researchers to write the first global history of the so-called "Cuban Missile Crisis" based on primary sources worlwide, which revisits fundamental concepts of IR and security studies such as the nuclear revolution, power, sovereignty, neutrality and alliance dynamics.
Sterre van Buuren
sterre.vanbuuren@sciencespo.fr
Sterre van Buuren has been a research assistant at the Nuclear Knowledges program since June 2023. Her research focuses on the compatibility of nuclear weapons and democracy. Sterre holds a BA in International Studies from Leiden University and an MA in International Security from Sciences Po.
Roxana Vermel
Roxana currently coordinates, with Benoit, the activities of the Nuclear Knowledges program. She holds a Master degree in Strategic Management from Paris X - HEC - ESSEC. Before joining the Center for International Relations (CERI) in 2004, she worked for the Romanian Ministry of Education, the French Ministry of Justice and the French Agency for the Development and Coordination of International Relations in the field of social protection. She has extensive experience in managing large international projects as well as in preparing project proposals for different European and international funding institutions.
Austin Cooper
Austin R. Cooper is an Assistant Professor of History at Purdue University and Senior Research Associate at SciencesPo CERI. He is finishing a book about France’s emergence as a nuclear weapon state during the 1960s and its first nuclear testing program in the Algerian Sahara at that time. He has published related work in the Nonproliferation Review and Cold War History. He completed fellowships in the Security Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. He earned a PhD in History and Sociology of Science from the University of Pennsylvania.
Thomas Fraise
Thomas Fraise is an associate researcher with the Nuclear Knowledges program. He is a postdoctoral researcher in the EU-funded Ritual Deterrence project at the University of Copenhagen (Denmark). He holds a Ph.D in international relations from Sciences Po, where he was part of the Nuclear Knowledges team, and was previously a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Security Studies Program). He is currently working on a book project entitled Restricted Democracies: Nuclear Weapons, Secrecy and Democracy, and on a project on NATO deterrence during the Cold War.
Grey Anderson
Dr Grey Anderson was a postdoctoral researcher with the Nuclear Knowledges Program at CERI in 2017/18. He currently works on the Euromissile crisis and the intellectual history of the Second Cold War in France. As a historian of modern Europe, with research interests in military history and the history of strategic thought, he wrote his PhD dissertation (Yale University, 2016, with distinction) and first book manuscript on "The Civil War in France, 1958-1962". His dissertation was awarded the 2016 Hans Gatze Prize for outstanding Yale dissertation in European history.
Roberto Cantoni
Roberto Cantoni was a postdoctoral researcher within CERI’s program on Nuclear Knowledges in 2017/18. He currently works on the project: “Promise brokers: a diachronic study of the epistemology of the energy promise in France (hydrocarbons and nuclear)”. Since his PhD dissertation, he has been researching the sociotechnical construction of energy systems in Europe, by adopting a transnational and diachronic approach. His research activity has focussed on the history of sociology of energy, including issues of waste management, in France, Italy, and Poland. In 2017 he published Oil Exploration, Diplomacy, and Security in the Early Cold War with Routledge. This monograph studies the interaction between, on the one hand, oil exploration and transport technologies, and on the other hand, resource diplomacy and security in Early Cold War France and Italy.
Kjølv Egeland
Dr. Kjølv Egeland is a Senior Researcher at NORSAR, a research institute in Norway, focusing on global governance, climate change, and nuclear disarmament. He completed his DPhil at the University of Oxford in 2018 before joining the Nuclear Knowledges program as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow in Security Studies between 2019 and 2023. Kjølv’s scholarly interests lie in nuclear discourse and politics, the philosophy of international law, and ideology critique. Writing on topics spanning from treaty-making processes to emerging military technology, his work has appeared in journals such International Affairs, Environmental Politics, Survival, and Global Governance. He is also the author of The Struggle for Abolition: Power and Legitimacy in Multilateral Nuclear Disarmament Diplomacy (Routledge, 2024).
Hassan Elbahtimy
Hassan Elbahtimy was an affiliated researcher to the Nuclear Knowledges program. The focus of Elbahtimy's work in affiliation with the overall project of the Chair of Excellence in Security Studies was a project on Egyptian nuclear history, as well as nuclear vulnerability and leadership style. He is currently a Teaching Fellow in Science and Security at King's College London, and was awarded a PhD from the War Studies Department in 2013, which focused on the historical origins of Egypt's nuclear policy between 1955 - 1968. In 2014, Dr Elbahtimy ran a collaborative research and training project with Atomic Weapons Establishment, UK (AWE) and the Norwegian Institute of Energy Technology. Dr Elbahtimy has also worked as a senior researcher at VERTIC and the Multilateral Department in the Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Charlotte Epstein
charlotte.epstein@sydney.edu.au
Charlotte Epstein is Associate Professor in the Department of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney, Australia. Her interests lie in the relationships between language, politics, and the body. She is the author of The Power of Words in International Relations: Birth of an Anti-Whaling Discourse (MIT Press, 2008, runner-up to the ISA Sprout award). She was a visiting researcher at the CERI where she was also affiliated with the Nuclear Knowledges program.
Alicia Jensen
Alicia Jensen was an intern with the Nuclear Knowledges program at CERI during her Master in International Security at the Paris School of International Affairs at Sciences Po Paris. Alicia's research focused on an assessment of the evolving interpretations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as the question of the atom bomb more generally, among different constituencies in Finland and Sweden from 1945 to 1962 based on untapped primary material. These constituencies include the press, military perspectives, as well as parliamentarians. The project is supported by the EU Nonproliferation Consortium.
Anushka Kaushik
Anushka Kaushik était assistante de recherche auprès de la chaire d'excellence en études de sécurité à Sciences Po pendant sa Maîtrise en Sécurité Internationale. Auparavant, elle a abordé les études nucléaires sous un angle strictement sécuritaire, ainsi que dans une perspective d'études critiques.
Fabricio Mendes Fialho
Dr. Fabrício Mendes Fialho was a postdoctoral research fellow with the Nuclear Knowledges program from between 2018 and 2019. He worked on the planning and design of a survey on attitudes toward nuclear weapons in the European Union within the ANR Project “de la vulnérabilité politique à l’âge nucléaire”.
Sébastien Philippe
Dr Sébastien Philippe is a Stanton Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center. His research focuses on developing new verification technologies and approaches to support future nuclear arms control and disarmament efforts. He was a visiting fellow with Sciences-Po Paris’ Nuclear Knowledges Program between March 2019 and June 2023. Before joining Harvard, Philippe was a Research Associate with Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security. He earned his PhD in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Princeton University and was recognized by the University as an Honorific Fellow for “outstanding performance and professional promise.” He also worked in the French Ministry of Defense, where he was a nuclear safety expert for the strategic nuclear forces.
Juliette Séjourné
Juliette Séjourné was artist in residence for the Nuclear Knowledges programme between February and June 2023. Using a research-creation approach, she worked on an auditory artistic production addressing the inadequacy between what is known about nuclear vulnerabilities and what citizens believe. The resulting installation, Our Things, is an immersive sound creation project tracing the history and geography of nuclear explosions on the planet since 1945. It was presented at the International Symposium on Electronic Arts in 2024.
Nariman Shelekpayev
nariman.shelekpayev@sciencespo.fr
Dr Nari Shelekpayev has been a postdoctoral research fellow with the Nuclear Knowledges program since November 2018. Within the ERC funded project NUCLEAR on ‘governing nuclear weapons choices’, he will focus on the intellectual history of categories used to make sense of nuclear realities and possibilities in Russian and Chinese in the post-Cold War context. He specializes in the intellectual history, comparative history of empires in the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as Soviet and post-Soviet history.
Alexander Sorg
Alexander was a postdoctoral researcher in the Nuclear Knowledges programme between March and July 2024. He worked on conducting a survey on perceptions and knowledge of nuclear weapons in nine European countries. Alexander is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University.
Hebatalla Taha
Dr Hebatalla Taha is an affiliated scholar with the Nuclear Knowledges program as well as Associate Senior Lecturer at Lund University. Her work focuses on the intellectual history of categories used to make sense of nuclear realities and possibilities in the Middle East in the post-Cold War context. Her broader research interests include political economy, anthropology of development, as well as peace, conflict, and insecurity. She completed a DPhil (2017) and MPhil in Modern Middle East Studies (2013) at the University of Oxford.
Clément Therme
Dr Clément Therme was a post-doctoral Research Fellow with the Nuclear Knowledges program at Sciences Po (CERI). His research within the ANR-funded VULPAN project and his teaching at Sciences Po (PSIA) focus on the history and politics of (non)-proliferation with Iran as a case study. Previously, he was a Research Fellow for Iran at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) and Lecturer at the National Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilizations (Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales, INALCO) in Paris.
Anne Verschuren
Sanne is assistant professor in International Security at Boston University. She was previously a Marie Slodowska-Curie fellow with the Nuclear Knowledges programme between September 2022 and July 2023. Her research interests lie at the intersection of international relations, the domestic determinants of security policy, and the role of ideas, norms, and institutions in national security decision-making. She focuses on how states fight war, examining why they construct novel weapon technologies, how they envision fielding such technologies, and why they choose to abandon certain technologies and practices.
