Mays Smithwick

Mays Smithwick is a first-year Ph.D. student in the American Studies department. Mays investigates the intersections of religion and military imperialism. Through rhetorical genealogies, they investigate how systems of power and knowledge in the United States have inherited Euro-Christian subjectivities. They explore the modes of conquest enabled by this secular cosmology, in particular in the moral-behavioral apparatus of the military industrial complex.

Mays received their Bachelor of Arts at Eugene Lang College the New School for Liberal Arts, with a degree in Global Studies and minors in Philosophy and Media and Cultural Studies. They have a Master of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies from the Department of Experimental Humanities (XE) at New York University. They have worked with the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, the National Radioactive Waste Coalition, and the New York Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. Their writing appears in The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, and they co-authored “The Abolitionist Viewing Guide for Christopher Nolan’s ‘Oppenheimer,’” featured by NPR’s Science Friday. Their activism works towards a dismantling of the nuclear industrial complex.