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A horizontal collage of book and journal covers whose content is featured in this Reading List.

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 reading list 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.

The introduction to each book is free, and books may be purchased at dukeupress.edu.



JOURNAL ARTICLE

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

Frédéric Neyrat
South Atlantic Quarterly 115:2, 2016


JOURNAL ARTICLE

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

Ricia Anne Chansky
Pedagogy 19:1, 2019


BOOK

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

Orrin H. Pilkey and Keith C. Pilkey
2019


JOURNAL ARTICLE

Afterword: Reflections on Welfare from Postnuclear Fukushima

Anne Allison
South Atlantic Quarterly 115:1, 2016


BOOK

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

Aya Hirata Kimura
2016


JOURNAL ARTICLE

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

Kathrin Maurer
New German Critique 127, 2016


JOURNAL ARTICLE

Climate Trauma, or the Affects of the Catastrophe to Come

Michael Richardson
Environmental Humanities 10:1, 2018


BOOK

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

Vincanne Adams
2013


JOURNAL PHOTO ESSAY

Aesthetics of Catastrophe

Aric Mayer
Public Culture 20:2, 2008


BOOK

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

T. J. Demos
2020


JOURNAL ARTICLE

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

Ryan M. Alexander
Hispanic American Historical Review 100:1, 2020


JOURNAL ARTICLE

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

Esyllt Jones
Labor 3:3, 2006


BOOK

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

Charles F. Walker
2008


JOURNAL ARTICLE

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

Isak Winkel Holm
New German Critique 115, 2012


BOOK

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

Mark A. Healey
2011


JOURNAL ARTICLE

Deep Time and Disaster: Black Saturday and the Forgotten Past

Christine Hansen
Environmental Humanities 10:1, 2018


JOURNAL ARTICLE

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

Jerry Phillips
Novel 35:2–3, 2002


JOURNAL ARTICLE

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

Richard C. Keller
French Historical Studies 36:2, 2013


JOURNAL ARTICLE

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

Mark Schlesinger
Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 36:6, 2011


BOOK

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

Jairus Victor Grove
2019


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