WORKING PAPERS IN CRITICAL DISASTER STUDIES
Series 1: Historical Approaches to Covid-19
Call for Proposals

We seek proposals for brief, 2,000-3,000 word essays on the relationship between history and Covid-19. More specifically, we invite pitches for essays on the following topics: historical approaches to Covid-19; what historical study can offer our analysis of Covid; or what Covid does for our analysis in any field or subfield of history. Our intent is to publish essays that will be of interest to historians and students, with a special interest in essays that can be used in undergraduate courses to add Covid-related content to already existing courses. We seek essays that relate to any field of historical inquiry — any time period, any geography, and any theme — that would be useful to help students think about Covid historically or through historical approaches. They should be footnoted, but they need not contain new, primary-source research.

Please submit a proposal of 100-200 words by August 10, 2020. The editors will be in touch with decisions by August 19. Full essays will be due October 1, and they will then be peer reviewed, with the goal of publishing the essays in November and December. They will be published as a digitized collection, hosted on the website of the Initiative for Critical Disaster Studies at New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study.

Critical disaster studies is an international field, and we seek contributions from all countries and about any area of the world. We intend to have a bilingual publication process, in which we publish papers in English and the native language of the author, if different. We can accept contributions in English, French, German, and Italian and will endeavor to include abstracts in each of those languages. We may be able to publish in other languages, so please enquire if you would like to submit an essay in a different language. 

Potential themes include but are by no means limited to: 

  • Disasters or pandemics mitigation urban plan in the history of design
  • Oral Histories of Covid-19
  • Update on past and future of the “epidemiological transition” model
  • Historical comparison in the context of Covid-19
  • Disaster, pandemics, and intersecting layers of inequality
  • Politics and social movements in and related to disaster and pandemic
  • Urbanization patterns and forms in relation to disasters and pandemics
  • Segregated neighbourhoods in relation to disasters and pandemics
  • Rural settlements and Covid-19
  • Food accessibility during past disaster and post-disaster events
  • Migration and disasters and pandemics
  • History of disasters and pandemics

This series of working papers is organized under the auspices of the Historical Approaches to Covid-19 Working Group of the National Science Foundation-funded Social Science Extreme Events Research (SSEER) Network and the CONVERGE facility at the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado Boulder (NSF Award #1841338). 

Please submit your proposals as an email attachment (Word or PDF) to jacob.remes@nyu.edu. Please let us know if you have any questions.

Editorial committee:
Carla Brisotto, University of Florida (c.brisotto@ufl.edu)
Julia Engelschalt, Universität Bielefeld (julia.engelschalt@uni-bielefeld.de)
Julia Irwin, University of South Florida (juliai@usf.edu)
Valerie Marlowe, University of Delaware (marlowev@udel.edu)
Jacob Remes, New York University (jacob.remes@nyu.edu)