
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