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Catastrophe and Its Aftermath Syllabus

Date Published: 4/20/2020

Catastrophes, whether natural or influenced by humans, and our responses to them have defined and redefined societies for millennia. The books and articles in this syllabus explore the ways disasters affect us and how we emerge from them changed. These past lessons might help us conceptualize potential shapes for a post-COVID-19 world.

All book introductions are freely available.

The Biopolitics of Catastrophe, or How to Avert the Past and Regulate the Future

Frédéric Neyrat
South Atlantic Quarterly 115:2, 2016

Catastrophe and Its Aftermath Syllabus

The Biopolitics of Catastrophe, or How to Avert the Past and Regulate the Future

Teaching Hurricane María: Disaster Pedagogy and the Ugly Auto/Biography

Sea Level Rise: A Slow Tsunami on America’s Shores

Afterword: Reflections on Welfare from Postnuclear Fukushima

Radiation Brain Moms and Citizen Scientists: The Gender Politics of Food Contamination after Fukushima

Translating Catastrophes: Yoko Tawada's Poetic Responses to the 2011 Tōhoku Earthquake, the Tsunami, and Fukushima

Climate Trauma, or the Affects of the Catastrophe to Come

Markets of Sorrow, Labors of Faith: New Orleans in the Wake of Katrina

Aesthetics of Catastrophe

Beyond the World′s End: Arts of Living at the Crossing

The Fever of War: Epidemic Typhus and Public Health in Revolutionary Mexico City, 1915–1917

Politicizing the Laboring Body: Working Families, Death, and Burial in Winnipeg's Influenza Epidemic, 1918–1919

Shaky Colonialism: The 1746 Earthquake-Tsunami in Lima, Peru, and Its Long Aftermath

Earthquake in Haiti: Kleist and the Birth of Modern Disaster Discourse

The Ruins of the New Argentina: Peronism and the Remaking of San Juan after the 1944 Earthquake

Deep Time and Disaster: Black Saturday and the Forgotten Past

The Intuition of the Future: Utopia and Catastrophe in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower

Place Matters: Mortality, Space, and Urban Form in the 2003 Paris Heat Wave Disaster

Making the Best of Hard Times: How the Nation's Economic Circumstances Shaped the Public's Embrace of Health Care Reform

Savage Ecology: War and Geopolitics at the End of the World