In the Aftermath of Catastrophe (2014-2016)

Catastrophy

During the academic years 2014/15 and 2015/16, the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Analysis took as its theme In the Aftermath of Catastrophe. What happens in the wake of cataclysmic experiences: war, civil war, genocide, imperial collapse, natural disaster? The aim in part is to understand processes of reconstruction while delving into the nuances of the periods that follow disaster.

Topics Included:

  • How was the experience of catastrophe remembered and memorialized?
  • How was trauma conceived and dealt with?
  • How was the post-catastrophic present understood in relation to the pre-disaster past?

As always, we hope to address these questions from a wide variety of periods and places, from prehistory to the present and from all parts of the world.

Davis Center Fellows

2014-2015

Nichole Archambeau, University of California, Santa Barbara
"Souls under Siege: Surviving Plague, War, and Doubt in Fourteenth-Century Provence"

Pamela Ballinger, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
"Forgotten Refugees: Decolonization, Displaced Persons, and the Reconstruction of Italy, 1945-1960"

David Barnes, University of Pennslyvania
"Lazaretto Ghosts: Remembered Trauma and the Meanings of Quarantine in the Nineteenth-Century City"

Jennifer Foray, Purdue University
"Imperial Aftershocks: The Legacies of Decolonization in the Netherlands"

Pierre Force, Columbia University
"Wealth and Disaster: Atlantic Migrations from a Pyrenean Town in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries"

Atina Grossmann, Cooper Union
"Remapping Survival: Jewish Refugees and Lost Memories of Displacement, Trauma, and Rescue in Soviet Central Asia, Iran, and India"

Rebecca Nedostup, Brown University
"Living and Dying in the Long War: China and Taiwan, 1937-1959"

2015-2016

Susan Carruthers, Rutgers University-Newark
"The Good Occupation: Americans as Victors after the Second World War"

Pierre Fuller, University of Manchester
"Humanitarian Purges: Revolutionary Memory and Northwest China's Great Gansu Earthquake of 1920"

Jochen Hellbeck, Rutgers University-New Brunswick
"Moral Tales and Political Reckonings: Soviet Survivors of Nazi Occupation and Their Audiences (1943-1945)"

Marie Kelleher, California State University, Long Beach
"The Hungry City: Food, Famine, and a Year in the Life of Medieval Barcelona"

Emma Kuby, Northern Illinois University
"The Expert Witnesses: State Violence, Survivors, and the Anti-Concentration Camp Movement in Postwar Europe"

Arnaud Orain, University of Paris-8
"Repressing, Defusing, and Conjuring the Disasters at the End of Louis XIV's Reign: The Wild Hope of John Law's System (1717-1720)"

Yael A. Sternhell, Tel Aviv University
"The Afterlives of the Confederate Archive, 1865-1901"