Olya Feldberg is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Research Center on Economies, Societies, Arts and Techniques (CRESAT), Université de Haute-Alsace, where she is part of the ERC-funded GeoNuFE project. She holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Virginia (2025), where she subsequently held a postdoctoral position in the Engagements Liberal Arts Program. Her research concerns nuclear legacies and their governance: the ways societies inherit, classify, and live with radioactive contamination long after the projects that produced it have ended. Her work links a material world of contaminated bodies, territories, and deep geological time to the nuclear cultures of measurement, memory, and risk through which that world is made known and governed.

Her doctoral research developed these questions across the different sites where the memory of the Soviet nuclear project is brought back to life, from Kazakhstan’s Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site to the museums of nuclear technology in contemporary Russia. Across these cases she examines how memory, knowledge, risk, and reparative justice are entangled: how what is remembered shapes what can be known about contamination, and how both decide whose harm is recognized.

Her theoretical work historicizes the risk paradigm itself, showing how our theorizing of risk and modernity was forged in the nuclear age and the anti-nuclear movements that responded to it. Her research combines archival and ethnographic methods with computational text analysis. Olya’s work has appeared in Memory Studies.