N.A.J. Taylor was born in Kleve, Germany, in 1980, and educated at The University of Sydney and The University of Queensland, where his doctorate earned the university’s prize for research excellence. His fields of research and teaching are International Studies and Environmental Philosophy, with specialisations in International Ethics, Environmental Ethics and Politics, and the Nuclear Humanities.

He is currently an Alfred Deakin Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Deakin University (2021-23), and an Australian Defence Force Academy Visiting Fellow at The University of New South Wales (2020-23). He is also the recipient of a 2021 Travelling Fellowship from the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Prior to joining Deakin, he held the 2020 John Denis Fryer Memorial Library for Australian Literature Fellowship at The University of Queensland, and a 2020-22 Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at The University of British Columbia. He earlier taught for more than thirteen years in Australia and the United States, most recently as a lecturer at The University of Melbourne (2017-20). Crossing both cultural and disciplinary divides, he has held honorary and visiting appointments at Bard College, Sciences Po, Linköping University, La Trobe University, Roskilde University, Whitman College, and The New School, where he was an Australia Awards fellow.

He actively serves on several boards, including the advisory boards of the Atomic Photographers Guild and the Consequences of Radiation Exposure Museum, and the editorial boards of Global Change, Peace & Security, Journal of Sustainable Finance & Investment, and Unlikely: Journal for Creative Arts. He also contributes to several epistemic communities, such as Australians for War Powers Reform.

Taylor has published three books, Athens Dialogue on a Middle East Zone WMD Free Zone (European Public Law Organisation, 2013), Reimagining Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Nuclear Humanities in the post-Cold War (Routledge, 2017), and Jahnne Pasco-White: Kin (Art Ink and Unlikely, 2021), as well as three special issues, “Re-imagining Hiroshima” (Critical Military Studies, 2015), “Internal Relations” (Borderlands, 2017), and “Reimagining Maralinga” (Unlikely: Journal for Creative Arts, 2018). He has also sole-authored more than twenty scholarly articles and chapters (with more co-authored), as well as over one hundred sole-authored essays and reviews in literary journals and other periodicals.

Taylor’s completed projects have drawn more than $750,000 of external competitive grants and fellowships in North America, Europe, and Oceania. For instance, the Archive of Nuclear Harm which he directed between 2011 and 2018 was a contributing project to major initiatives by the peak Arts and Sciences bodies in Australia and Sweden, respectively. Earlier, the late vice-president of the International Court of Justice Judge Christopher Weeramantry wrote that the Athens Dialogue that he co-convened in 2012 was “outstanding” and “a significant step” that makes “a substantial contribution” to our understanding of the constraints and opportunities for comprehensive nuclear disarmament and nonproliferation. Prior to 2012, Taylor spent a decade advising pension and sovereign wealth funds on the ethics of transboundary environmental and social harm. In 2007 Australia’s university pension fund awarded him the inaugural prize for sustainable and ethical investment research where the panel of judges noted Taylor’s “pioneering role” which “may have single-handedly debunked any residual concerns [...] and could fundamentally change how [legislators and trustees] now tackle this subject”. He was also a founding member of the United Nations Global Compact Expert Group on Responsible Business and Investment in Conflict-Affected and High-Risk Areas, for whom he co-authored the first applied report in 2010. Much of this work has been widely-cited in Australian Parliament under Hansard.

He lives and works on Dja Dja Wurrung land and waters, with his partner and daughters.