Dr. Maxime Polleri is a sociocultural anthropologist with a regional focus on Japan and Canada. He received an undergraduate degree in East-Asian Studies and Anthropology from Université de Montréal. As a first year undergraduate student he participated in a Japanese homestay program, pursuing intensive Japanese language courses.   

In 2012, Maxime conducted research fieldwork in Tokyo, Japan, with the purpose of completing a master thesis in Anthropology from Université de Montréal. As a Visiting Student Researcher in the Department of Behavioral Sciences at Chiba University, he has examined the impact of cute visual culture (kawaii) on the construction of gender identity through Japanese media. In 2013, he went on to pursue a Ph.D. in the Department of Social Anthropology at York University. From 2015 to 2017, he conducted more 14 months of fieldwork in Japan, where he was a Visiting Student Researcher in the Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Saitama University. His Ph.D. thesis focused on the governance of radiation hazards after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster. His fieldwork took place in urban and rural areas of Japan, predominantly in Fukushima and Tokyo. His research was funded by the Ontario Graduate Scholarship, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and the Japan Foundation, among others. 

From 2018 to 2020, Maxime was a MacArthur Nuclear Security Pre-doctoral and Post-doctoral Fellow in the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. During that time, he collaborated with Stanford faculty members and students of the Moscow Engineering Physics University to examine the challenges associated with nuclear power and disasters, resulting in a series of articles for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

From 2020 to 2021, Dr. Polleri was a Post-doctoral Researcher at McGill University, as part of the “EPI-AI Project,” a Canadian-UK Artificial Intelligence grant initiative that aims to achieve a step change in automated global epidemic alerting using news media monitoring.

In 2021, Dr. Polleri joined the Department of Anthropology in the Faculty of Social Science at Université Laval. He is also a member of the Graduate School of International Studies. His research and teaching program have been organized around four areas that contributed to a better understanding of contemporary anthropological issues: (1) the anthropology of disasters; (2) the governance of waste and pollution; (3) the practices of misinformation and disinformation; (4) the biases of generative artificial intelligence. In 2026, he was a visiting researcher at Tokyo Denki University as part of an Invitational Fellowship for Research in Japan by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.

His research projects were funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Fonds de recherche du Québec, IVADO-Inria, and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. His research was published in American Ethnologist, American Anthropologist, Anthropological Quarterly, Anthropology Now, Anthropology Today, Social Studies of Science, and Current History, among others.