Aanchal Saraf is a PhD candidate in American Studies and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. She comes to Yale from Brown University, graduating in 2016, receiving a B.A. with Honors in Geography and Ethnic Studies, Magna Cum Laude. As a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow, she wrote a senior thesis in the form of an ethnography, focusing on indigenous activism and environmental ontologies in Hawai’i, particularly surrounding Kanaka Maoli communities living on the Big Island and protesting development of the Thirty Meter Telescope on the sacred summit of Mauna Kea. Her undergraduate research speaks to her interests in ethnography, imperialisms in the Asia/Pacific, and science studies. After graduation, she moved to Bumthang, Bhutan, where she was an academic intern for a political ecology course on Himalayan socioeconomics. She came to Yale in 2017 as a National Science Foundation GRFP recipient, and is currently thinking about toxic geographies, US military occupation in the Pacific, and frameworks of racialization under liberal multiculturalism.