CONTRIBUTORS
About the Editors
Alexa S. Dietrich is an interdisciplinary environmental health scientist. She worked at the Social Science Research Council from 2017 to 2023, developing research programs with ethically collaborative approaches. She also cocurated essay series on disaster uncertainty, religion and democracy, and understanding COVID-19. Her book The Drug Company Next Door: Pollution, Jobs, and Community Health in Puerto Rico (NYU Press) won the Julian Steward Award for the best book in environmental anthropology in 2015. She is the research director of the Center for Science & Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
Scott Gabriel Knowles serves as the senior director of research for the Defense Industrial Base Institute and research professor in the Department of History at Northeastern University. From 2020 to 2022, Knowles hosted COVIDCalls every weekday, a live podcast discussion of the COVID-19 pandemic. He is also a founding coeditor of the Journal of Disaster Studies.
Rodrigo Ugarte is an editor at the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), currently overseeing the Just Tech program’s online platform. Before joining the SSRC, he wrote about deported undocumented veterans, Jewish Argentine troops during the Falklands War, World War II female aviators, and various other topics for multiple online publications. Ugarte graduated with a BA in writing from Ithaca College. He edited an earlier version of this collection of pieces, which were published in the SSRC’s online forum Items: Insights from the Social Sciences.
About the Contributors
Joie Acosta, PhD, is a senior behavioral scientist at RAND and a community and cultural psychologist. Dr. Acosta specializes in community-based participatory research on community resilience and long-term recovery.
George Aumoithe, assistant professor of history and African and African American studies at Harvard University, investigates US politics, civil rights law, and public health administration.
Tanya Buhler Corbin is a professor of disaster management and the department chair for Emergency, Disaster and Global Security Studies at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.
Anirban Kapil Baishya is an assistant professor of rhetoric, politics, and culture in the Department of Communication Arts, University of Wisconsin–Madison. Baishya is a coeditor, with Darshana Sreedhar Mini, of South Asian Pornographies: Vernacular Formations of the Permissible and the Obscene (Routledge, 2024).
Jih-Fei Cheng is an associate professor of feminist, gender, and sexuality studies at Scripps College. He is a coeditor of AIDS and the Distribution of Crises (Duke University Press, 2020).
Moon Choi (최문정) is an associate professor at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology Graduate School of Science and Technology Policy. She founded and has run the research group Aging and Technology Policy Lab (http://aging.kaist.ac.kr) with a focus on examining the mechanisms of social problems related to population aging and new technologies.
Vivian Choi is an associate professor of anthropology and a core faculty member in environmental studies and race and ethnic studies at St. Olaf College. She is the author of Disaster Nationalism: Tsunami and Civil War in Sri Lanka (Duke University Press, 2025).
Nishaant Choksi is an assistant professor of social sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology–Gandhinagar in Gujarat, India. His research areas include the study of script and writing systems, language, performance, the aesthetic component of language, cultural politics of heritage, and issues of self-governance and livelihood.
Aaron Clark-Ginsberg, PhD, is a social scientist at RAND. An applied risk and disaster researcher, Clark-Ginsberg specializes in community responses to crises, a topic he has focused on for close to two decades with research in over a dozen countries.
Sukanya Deogam hails from the West Singhbum district, Jharkhand, and belongs to the Indigenous Ho community. She is currently a doctoral student at the Indian Institute of Technology–Gandhinagar researching the changing attitudes toward death and dying among the various Indigenous communities of Jharkhand.
Kim Fortun is a professor in the University of California–Irvine Department of Anthropology. She is the author of Advocacy After Bhopal: Environmentalism, Disaster, New Global Orders (University of Chicago Press, 2001).
Alice Fothergill is a professor of sociology at the University of Vermont. She is a coauthor of the award-winning book Children of Katrina (University of Texas Press, 2015) and the author of Heads Above Water: Gender, Class, and Family in the Grand Forks Flood (SUNY Press, 2004).
Danya Glabau is a medical anthropologist and science and technology studies scholar researching health activism, the medical economy, and how human bodies become valuable data. She directs the science and technology studies minor, the feminism and STEM minor, and the ethics and technology undergraduate curriculum at the New York University Tandon School of Engineering.
Monica H. Green is a historian of medicine specializing in the premodern period and the comparative history of global health. She has just finished preparing an open-access teaching module on the Second Plague Pandemic and is currently completing the forthcoming The Black Death: A Global History, which melds new insights from genetics, bioarchaeology, and documentary history.
Gregg Gonsalves is an Associate Professor in the Department of the Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases at Yale School of Public Health. His research focused on the intersection of infectious diseases and substance use, social justice and public health. His work is funded by the National Institutes of Health. He is a 2018 MacArthur Fellow.
Emily Smith-Greenaway is Dean’s Professor of Sociology and Professor of Spatial Sciences at the University of Southern California. Her research infuses social-psychological perspectives into demography to advance how we quantify and theorize population processes and how we study them in cause and consequence. Her work is funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.
Dolly Jørgensen is a professor of history at the University of Stavanger, Norway, specializing in histories of environment and technology, particularly human-animal-technology relations. Her most recent books are Ghosts Behind Glass: Encountering Extinction in Museums (University of Chicago Press, 2025) and The Medieval Pig (Boydell Press, 2024).
Dani Joslyn is a scholar-activist in New York City and completing their PhD in history at New York University in December 2024.
Christine Keeves, MPH, is an equity-focused artist, advocate, and movement builder. As a cofounder and chief of communications at Marked By Covid, she cocreated the National Covid Memorial, a groundbreaking augmented reality monument.
Hyunah Keum is a PhD candidate in the Graduate School of Science and Technology Policy at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. She is interested in waste, infrastructure, and labor at the intersection of science and technology studies and environmental history.
Christos Lynteris is a professor of medical anthropology at the University of St Andrews. His most recent monograph is Visual Plague: The Emergence of Epidemic Photography (MIT Press, 2022).
Rachel Margolis is a professor of sociology at the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada. Her research focuses on how family dynamics shape population change over time. She has studied how and why grandparenthood is changing over time, how family networks are evolving, and how the thinning of kinship networks affects older adults.
Katherine A. Mason is an associate professor of anthropology at Brown University and is a cofounder of the Pandemic Journaling Project. She is the author of Infectious Change: Reinventing Chinese Public Health After an Epidemic (Stanford University Press, 2016), which examines the long-term impact of the 2003 SARS epidemic on China’s public health profession.
Tyesha Maddox is an associate professor at Fordham University in the Department of African and African American Studies. She is the author of A Home Away from Home: Mutual Aid, Political Activism, and Caribbean American Identity (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024).
Luke J. Matthews, PhD, is a senior behavioral and social scientist at RAND. His work applies network models and cultural theory to the dynamics of misinformation, collective action, and how the public and knowledge professionals (scientists and journalists) interact to produce truth or falsehoods.
Darshana Sreedhar Mini is an associate professor of film at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is the author of Rated A: Soft-Porn Cinema and Mediations of Desire in India (University of California Press, 2024) and a coeditor, with Anirban K. Baishya, of South Asian Pornographies: Vernacular Formations of the Permissible and the Obscene (Routledge, 2024).
Samantha Montano is an assistant professor of emergency management at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy, where she teaches core emergency management courses and disaster policy. Montano is the author of the book Disasterology: Dispatches from the Frontlines of the Climate Crisis (HarperCollins, 2025).
Dr. Courtney Page-Tan is an assistant professor of public affairs and community resilience at the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University–Indianapolis. Her research examines how communities and social networks mitigate the adverse outcomes of unexpected shocks and short- and long-term stressors.
Hyeonbin Park is a PhD candidate at the Graduate School of Science and Technology Policy at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. Hyeonbin’s research interests cover forest fires, ecology, and multispecies relationships at the intersection of science and technology studies, environmental history, and disaster studies.
Lori Peek is director of the Natural Hazards Center and professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Colorado–Boulder. She is the author of the award-winning book Behind the Backlash: Muslim Americans after 9/11 (Temple University Press, 2010); a coeditor of Displaced: Life in the Katrina Diaspora (University of Texas Press, 2012) and the Handbook of Environmental Sociology (Springer, 2021), and a coauthor of Children of Katrina (University of Texas Press, 2015) and The Continuing Storm: Learning from Katrina (University of Texas Press, 2022).
Elisa Perego, MA PHD, is a researcher and long COVID advocate. Perego has received numerous recognitions for her research, including a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, multiple honorary research fellowships at University College London, and a Ralegh Radford Rome Fellowship at the British School at Rome.
Rashawn Ray is a professor of sociology and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. He regularly testifies at the federal and state levels on racial equity, policing and criminal justice reform, health policy, wealth disparities, and family policy.
Kalpesh Rathwa hails from Chhota Udepur district, Gujarat, and belongs to the Indigenous Rathwa community. Currently he works as a researcher at the Indian Institute of Technology–Gandhinagar on the issue of linguistic and cultural change brought about by dam-induced displacement in the Narmada Valley in western India.
Monica Sanders, JD, LLM, is an attorney, educator, and advocate. She focuses on disasters, climate justice, and how law and policy can be both inhibitors and creators of systemic change. Sanders teaches at the Georgetown University Law Center and is affiliated faculty with the Earth Commons Initiative at Georgetown.
Amanda Savitt has a PhD in emergency management from North Dakota State University. Her research interests include theory development, understanding effectiveness, and evaluating emergency management capacity in the United States.
Heather Schulte is an interdisciplinary artist based in Colorado. Her work combines handmade textile materials and techniques with digital fabrication and design processes, analyzing the intersection of personal and public forms of language and communication. She founded and directs Stitching the Situation, a community-based nonprofit that archives and memorializes experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic through collective embroidery. Stitching the Situation was awarded an INSITE fund grant for 2025, funded by the Andy Warhol Foundation, to begin documenting the experiences of those living with Long Covid. She also headed the Denver Principles Flagpole Project, honoring the work of past and present HIV/AIDS activists in collaboration with people living with HIV and the CO Health Network. Schulte is now working to place a National Landmark in Denver to permanently honor the global impact of the Denver Principles. In 2022, she received an Arts and Creative Placemaking award from the University of Florida Center for Arts and Medicine.
Sarah Senk, PhD, is a Professor in the Department of English at California Polytechnic University, San Luis Obispo, based on the Cal Poly Maritime Academy campus. A member of the Board of Directors of Marked By Covid, her research focuses on trauma, cultural memory, and disaster commemoration in the digital age.
Robert Soden is an assistant professor in computer science and the School of the Environment at the University of Toronto. He leads the Toronto Climate Observatory (http://climateobservatory.ca).
Jacob Steere-Williams, PhD, is an associate professor in the history of medicine at the College of Charleston. In addition to dozens of scholarly articles, popular essays, and op-eds, he is the author of The Filth Disease: Typhoid Fever and the Practices of Epidemiology in Victorian England (University of Rochester Press, 2020).
Cécile Stephanie Stehrenberger is an assistant professor for historical comparative studies of science and technology at the University of Wuppertal in Germany. Her research focuses on the history of disaster science, the entangled history of toxic waste, and studies of antidisaster activism and gender.
Kathleen Tierney is professor emerita in the Department of Sociology and a fellow in the Institute of Behavioral Science at the University of Colorado–Boulder. From 2003 to 2017, she was the director of the university’s Natural Hazards Center.
Kristin Urquiza, MPA, is an advocate for equity and justice with expertise in racial, economic, environmental, and health policy. After losing her father to COVID in 2020, she cofounded Marked By Covid, a movement for pandemic remembrance and justice.
Ashton M. Verdery is a professor of sociology, demography, and social data analytics in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at Pennsylvania State University and a cofunded faculty member of the university’s Institute for Computational and Data Sciences.
Carlos Villegas, a PhD student at the RAND School of Public Policy and an assistant policy researcher at RAND, specializes in emerging technologies, urban resilience, and disaster response.
Haowei Wang is an assistant professor of sociology and a faculty affiliate of the Aging Studies Institute at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. Dr. Wang’s work has been published in interdisciplinary journals such as Demography, the Journals of Gerontology, and Social Science & Medicine.
Jacqueline Wernimont is the Distinguished Chair of Digital Humanities and Social Engagement and an associate professor of film and media studies at Dartmouth College. Her books include Numbered Lives: Life and Death in Quantum Media (MIT Press, 2019), and the coedited volume, with Elizabeth Losh, Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminism and Digital Humanities (University of Minnesota Press, 2019).
Sarah S. Willen is a professor of anthropology at the University of Connecticut, a codirector of the Research Program on Global Health & Human Rights at the university’s Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute, and a cofounder of the Pandemic Journaling Project. Her books include Fighting for Dignity: Migrant Lives on Israel’s Margins (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019) and the coedited volume, Shattering Culture: American Medicine Responds to Cultural Diversity (Russell Sage, 2011).
Heather M. Wurtz is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Population and Public Health Sciences at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine. She has published widely in journals including Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Social Science & Medicine, the Journal of Marriage and Family, and Health Equity.
Myungji Yang is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Hawai‘i-Mānoa. She is currently finishing her book on right-wing politics in South Korea, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.
Carl Zimring is a professor of sustainability studies at Pratt Institute. His books include Cash for Your Trash: Scrap Recycling in America (Rutgers University Press, 2005), Clean and White: A History of Environmental Racism in the United States (NYU Press, 2016), Aluminum Upcycled: Sustainable Design in Historical Perspective (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017), and, with Sara B. Pritchard, Technology and the Environment in History (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020).