Shiloh Krupar is a Geographer and Professor at Georgetown University, where she currently teaches in the Culture and Politics Program in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. She holds a Ph.D. in Geography from the University of California-Berkeley, an MA in East Asian Studies from Stanford University, and a BA from Case Western Reserve University. Her scholarship concerns the spatial administration of inequality, vulnerability, toxicity, uncertainty, and uneven life conditions, which she considers to be geographical political and embodied relationships. Her teaching and research interests, which span geography, art/architecture, the medical humanities, science & technology studies, and environmental justice, have examined several empirical terrains: militarized ecologies and the politics of remediation/compensation; model cities and urban sustainability initiatives in China; environmental, juridical, and financial disasters; biomedical governance of health/disease, race and medical geosurveillance. She joined the Institute for Advanced Study in AY23-24 to research heat information systems that facilitate targeted health interventions and climate securitization.
Supported by a Quadrant Fellowship, her book Hot Spotter’s Report: Military Fables of Toxic Waste (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) investigates the politics of nature conservation, environmental memory, contamination and compensation issues at decommissioned military sites in the western United States. Her second book Deadly Biocultures: The Ethics of Life-Making (University of Minnesota Press, 2019, co-authored with Nadine Ehlers, The University of Sydney) examines the affirmation to hope, target, thrive, secure, and green in the respective biocultures of cancer, race-based health, fatness, aging, and the afterlife. Its chapters focus on specific practices and technologies that ostensibly affirm life but are linked to capital in ways that create inequities and deathly conditions. Her third book Health Colonialism: Urban Wastelands and Hospital Frontiers (University of Minnesota Press, 2023, Forerunners series) considers how U.S. urban development policies contribute to the uneven and unjust distribution of health care, namely, the racially inequitable effects of elite U.S. hospitals on their surrounding neighborhoods and their role in consolidating global medical entrepots. Krupar is currently completing the volume Territories of Exaction: Austerity, Bias, Dross (co-authored with C. Greig Crysler, University of California-Berkeley), which positions austerity as a form of environmental colonialism and uses experimental diagnostic devices, such as the EcoDigestor, to galvanize public humanities engagement with municipal finance and debt. A fifth volume in preparation, entitled Folklore of Operational Banality: Medical Administration and the Biocratic Grotesque, considers intimate everyday forms of violence associated with the political economy of hospitals, medical bureaucracy, and health care interventions that exclude broader social etiologies of disease and illness.
In addition to her books, Krupar's research has been published in numerous geography and interdisciplinary venues, including: Society and Space, Theory, Culture & Society, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Science, Technology & Human Values, Environmental Humanities, Journal of Medical Humanities, Culture, Theory & Critique, Antipode, Public Culture, Radical History Review, Configurations, Liminalities, cultural geographies, Medicine, Conflict and Survival, Occasion, Social Semiotics, The New Inquiry, and Progress in Human Geography. The 2022 Routledge Handbook of Waste Studies features a chapter on Krupar's contaminated land redevelopment and racial justice research. The 2012 SAGE Handbook of Architectural Theory includes her co-authored chapter (with Stefan Al, University of Pennsylvania) on theories of spectacle and branding. She has also contributed chapters to the edited volumes: Toxic Immanence: Decolonizing Nuclear Legacies and Futures (2022); Routledge Handbook of Architecture, Urban Space & Politics Vol I (2022), Slow Down: How the Arts and Humanities Can Reclaim the University from the Cult of Speed (2019); Subprime Health: Debt and Race in US Medicine (2017); Global Spectacles (2016); Critical Landscapes: Art, Space, Politics (2015); and Spaces of Danger: Culture and Power in the Everyday (2015).
Among the most recent recognition of her research, Krupar is currently an AY24-25 "Data Ecologies" fellow in the Institute for Sustainable Energy and Environment of Virginia Commonwealth University, and was a "Platform" fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study's School of Social Science in Princeton AY23-24. She is a Founding Board Member of the Sydney Centre for Healthy Societies in the research cluster “Race, Ethnicity, and the Biohumanities,” at The University of Sydney, Australia. Her research has also been included in the public online resource compilation “Race, Bioethics, and Public Health Project,” administered by the Yale University Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics. At Georgetown University she was an AY20-23 Mortara Faculty Fellow in the research cluster “Technology and Violence” at the Mortara Center for International Studies.
Krupar received the American Association of Geographers Glenda Laws Award (2023) for outstanding geographic scholarship on social issues. She is deeply committed to the public humanities and public geographies, with scholarly practices that extend beyond writing/speaking and conventional forms of academic engagement. She has co-developed and co-constructed the civic digital infrastructure A People’s Atlas of Nuclear Colorado (2021 launch, Scalar/USC Alliance for Networking Visual Culture), as the beta test and model for her long-term digital humanities project A People’s Atlas of the Nuclear United States (with Sarah Kanouse, Northeastern University). Supported by a Georgetown University Pilot Research Project Grant, A People's Atlas is an open-source repository of interactive data sets rooted in the complex geographies of Colorado, a microcosm of the globally expansive U.S. nuclear complex, from extraction, milling, and processing to the assembly and deployment of weapons to the storage and monitoring of waste. Through the initial geographic lens of Colorado, the atlas draws together maps and site descriptions; issue briefs offering historical and policy contexts; artworks responding to nuclear legacies; and scholarly essays connecting Colorado’s atomic histories to environmental justice, technoscientific practice, nuclear citizenry, and political hegemony. The project functions as a resource tool and platform for civic action, infusing nuclear public policy and public memory discussions with humanistic forms of inquiry.
Her collaborative long-term participatory art/research project “The National Toxic Land/Labor Conservation Service” (also with Sarah Kanouse, Northeastern University) works at the intersection of art, research, and government policy to address the toxic afterlife of U.S. militarism and has been included in Momenta Arts’ “Institute for Wishful Thinking” (NYC, 2011), “Ecocultures” exhibition (George Mason University, 2011), Figure One Gallery’s “National TLC Service Mobile Field Office” (Champaign, IL, 2013 *solo show), the exhibition "Monument to Cold War Victory" (Cooper Union, NYC, October 2014); “Atomic Landscapes” at IDEA Space (Colorado Springs, CO 2016); “Facing Rocky Flats” exhibition (Canyon Gallery, Boulder, CO and the Denver Public Library, CO 2018); and the Krannert Art Museum’s “Hot Spots: Radioactivity and the Landscape” (Champaign, IL 2019-20) among others. A growing list of scholarly work has cited and discussed the National TLC Service project, such as the edited volume Doom With A View: Historical and Cultural Contexts of the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant (2020), Monument to Cold War Victory (2018), and journal Hemispheres: Visual Cultures of the Americas (2018).
Krupar has been invited to give lectures and performances at numerous venues, including the Neil Smith Annual Memorial Lecture at the University of St. Andrews, the Royal Geographical Society in London, the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study’s workshop “Space, Power, Nation,” the Montreal-based Artivistic Conference “Un.Occupied Spaces,” The University of Sydney “Biopolitics of Science Research Network,” plenary speaker for the University of California-Davis “Everyday Militarisms” Collaboratory, Princeton University’s “Producing Waste, Producing Space” Mellon Humanities Program, Cornell University’s Environmental Justice Speaker Series and “Historians Are Writers” symposium, Rutgers University’s Annual Lecture on New Geographic Thought, the plenary panel of the Dimensions of Political Ecology Conference, keynote for the "Fallout: Asian Networks of Nuclearity" workshop at the University of Colorado Boulder, Georgetown University and Oxford University's Future of the Humanities series, the Universidad San Francisco de Quito's lecture series "Public Stages: Architecture, Nature and Urban Cohabitation," the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami's "Ecologies of War" seminar, the College Art Association, and more. Krupar also regularly presents and participates at the annual meetings of the American Association of Geographers, the American Studies Association, and the 4S Society for the Social Studies of Science.
As a member of the CULP core faculty, Professor Krupar teaches the courses “Theorizing Culture and Politics,” “Green Politics,” “Detouring the Global City,” “Introduction to Critical Geography: Theory and Practice,” "Cartography and Social Justice," "Civic Geographies," and other offerings on medical humanities and health inequities, racial capitalism and land politics. She has worked collaboratively with The Phillips Collection to develop an institutional partnership and innovative course on “Globalization, Diplomacy, and the Politics of Exhibitions.” Krupar received the Georgetown School of Foreign Service Excellence in Teaching Award in 2019.