Politics of Disaster

Event Details

In late October 2012, Hurricane Sandy devastated areas of New York City and the New Jersey Shore. The hurricane marked the latest in a series of natural and human-caused disasters – Hurricane Katrina, the BP oil spill, Fukushima – that rocked the public’s confidence in the response capacities of both government and the private sector. As the two-year anniversary of Sandy approaches, the Miller Center’s GREAT ISSUES program will explore the history of disasters and disaster response policy. Featuring two leading historians in the emerging field of disaster history -- SCOTT KNOWLES, Associate Professor of History and Politics at Drexel University and ANDREW MORRIS, Associate Professor of History at Union College -- the event will probe how experts and policymakers have understood disasters through history and how public policy has changed in response. From this historical perspective, it will explore how future disaster response and recovery efforts might be improved. 

SCOTT KNOWLES earned his Ph.D. in the history of science, medicine, and technology at Johns Hopkins University, and he is the author of The Disaster Experts: Mastering Risk in Modern America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). Knowles is the co-editor of Penn Press’ new "Critical Studies in Risk and Disaster" series, and he is a faculty research fellow of the University of Delaware’s Disaster Research Center.  Since 2011, he has been a member of the Fukushima Forum collaborative research community, with which he is co-editing a volume on the Fukushima disasters. In addition, Knowles serves on Philadelphia Mayor Michael A. Nutter's Special Advisory Commission on Licenses and Inspections.

ANDREW MORRIS earned his Ph.D. at the University of Virginia, where he was also a Miller Center National Fellow. Morris is the author of The Limits of Voluntarism: Charity and Welfare From the New Deal Through the Great Society (Cambridge University Press, 2009). He is currently working on a book on the transformation of disaster relief in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s.