Books and Special Issues
Critical Disaster Studies
Edited with Andy Horowitz
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021.
“When speaking of disaster henceforth, we cannot escape the ensuing political questions this volume interrogates.” ― Los Angeles Review of Books
“This is a vital, iconoclastic volume that turns much conventional thinking about disaster studies on its head. The contributions are lively, geographically varied, and conceptually suggestive. An exciting and invaluable book.” ― Rob Nixon, Princeton University
“In a world marked by calamity, this timely volume widens the lens of our understanding by emphasizing the importance of deeply contextualized approaches to the study of disaster. The end result is a vibrant reimagination of the field and a captivating introduction to critical disaster studies.” ― Lori Peek, University of Colorado Boulder
Disaster Citizenship: Survivors, Solidarity, and Power in the Progressive Era
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016.
Reviews and press
“A striking juxtaposition of the hierarchical order of experts and vernacular order created by victims themselves, Remes’s finely grained comparison of two major turn-of-the-century disasters in Halifax and Salem represents a major contribution to our understanding of the dynamics and effects of spontaneous order in a crisis. Meticulously researched, gripping, and important.” ― James C. Scott, author of Seeing
Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
“In his meticulously researched and intelligently argued book, Disaster Citizenship, Jacob Remes has advanced and perfected the kind of deep social history pioneered by Herbert Gutman and Linda Gordon in their studies of working people’s lives. More than any other historian writing in this tradition, Remes has revealed the power of the informal networks and solidarities that existed in poorer communities, particularly during disasters, and he has highlighted the ways agents of state intervention failed to understand these strengths and their democratic significance. Scholars will find in this excellent study a model of transnational history and other readers, especially officials in charge of disaster relief, will discover a new way of thinking about the people they are attempting to ‘rescue.'” ― James Green, author of The Devil Is Here in These Hills: West Virginia’s Coal Miners and Their Battle for Freedom
“Continent, Empire, and Transnationalism in Canadian History: Essays in Honor of John Herd Thompson”
Edited with Paula Hastings
Special issue of American Review of Canadian Studies 45 no. 1 (March 2015).
Peer Reviewed Articles and Book Chapters
“Covid-19 in a Border Nation,” in The Long Year: The 2020 Reader, ed. Thomas J. Sugrue and Caitlin Zaloom (New York: Columbia University Press, 2022), 431-448.
With Andy Horowitz, “Introducing Critical Disaster Studies,” in Critical Disaster Studies, ed. Jacob A.C. Remes and Andy Horowitz (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), 1-8.
“What We Talk About When We Talk About Africville,” African American Review 51, no. 3 (fall 2018): 223-231.
With Kevin A. Gould and M. Magdalena Garcia, “Beyond ‘natural-disasters-are-not-natural’: The Work of State and Nature after the 2010 Earthquake in Chile,” Journal of Political Ecology 23 (2016): 93-114.
“‘Committed as Near Neighbors’: The Halifax Explosion and Border-Crossing People and Ideas,” American Review of Canadian Studies 45, no. 1 (March 2015): 26-43.
“Mi’kmaq in the Halifax Explosion of 1917: Leadership, Transience, and the Struggle for Land Rights,” Ethnohistory 61, no. 3 (summer 2014): 445-466.
“Moveable Type: Toronto’s Transnational Printers, 1866-1872,” in Workers Across the Americas: The Transnational Turn in Labor History, ed. Leon Fink (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 384-408.
“In Search of ‘Saner Minds’: Bishop James Morrison and the Origins of the Antigonish Movement,” Acadiensis 39 (winter/spring 2010): 58-82.
Articles and Book Chapters Not Peer Reviewed
“On Work and Disaster,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History 20, no. 2 (May 2022) (in press).
“Labor Organizing in Higher Ed: Lessons from the 1984-85 Yale Strike,” Activist History Review 4 September 2019.
“International Expertise and Its Discontents: What Disaster History Can Show about the Progressive Era,” The American Historian no. 15 (February 2018), 30-35.
“Books in the Basement: Formal Movement Learning and Turning Discontent Into Understanding,” a response to Aziz Chourdry in Explorations in Adult Education: An Occasional Papers Series no. 4 (summer 2016): 61-68.
Introduction to “Empire, Continent and Transnationalism in Canadian History: Essays in Honour of John Herd Thompson” (with Paula Hastings), American Review of Canadian Studies 45 no 1. (March 2015): 1-7.
“Historical Crushes: Annie Burlak,” The Appendix 2, no. 1 (January 2014).
Introduction to “Share Our Future: The CLASSE Manifesto,” All About Mentoring 42 (winter 2013): 114-118.
“Solidarity, Citizenship, and the Opportunities of Disasters,” in Labor Rising: The Past and Future of Working People in America, ed. Daniel Katz and Richard Greenwald (New York: New Press, 2012), 143-153.
Book Reviews
Review of Catastrophe: Stories and Lessons from the Halifax Explosion, by T. Joseph Scanlon, and Rebuilding Halifax: A History of the Halifax Relief Commission, by Barry Cahill, Canadian Historical Review (forthcoming).
Review of Working Lives: Essays in Canadian Working-Class History, by Craig Heron, Labor: Studies in Working-Class History 17, no. 4 (December 2020): 132-133.
Review of Border Flows: A Century of the Canadian-American Water Relationship, edited by Lynne Heasley and Daniel Macfarlane, Canadian Historical Review 99, no. 4 (December 2018): 683-684.
Review of Ghostworkers and Greens: The Cooperative Campaigns of Farmworkers and Environmentalists for Pesticide Reform, by Adam Tompkins, New Solutions: A Journal of Environmental and Occupational Health Policy 27, no. 4 (2018): 667-670.
Review of Slaughterhouse: Chicago’s Union Stock Yard and the World it Made, by Dominic A. Pacyga, Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 14, no. 2 (May 2017): 137-139.
Review of The American Red Cross from Clara Barton to the New Deal, by Marian Moser Jones, Journal of American History 100, no. 3 (December 2013): 850-851.
Review of The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in its First Age of Terror, by Beverly Gage, Labor History 54 no. 3 (2013): 352-353.
Review of Jobs and Justice: Fighting Discrimination in Wartime Canada, 1939-1945, by Carmela Patrias, Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 10 no. 2 (spring 2013): 127-128.
Review of Loyal but French: The Negotiation of Identity by French-Canadian Descendants in the United States, by Mark Paul Richard, Québec Studies 49 (spring/summer 2010), 187-188.
Journalism and Popular Writing
“How Humans Make Disasters Worse,” Time online 31 August 2017.
“Finding Solidarity in Disaster,” The Atlantic 1 September 2015.
“Noted: Students Strike in Quebec,” The Nation 25 June 2012: 5.
“May Day’s Radical History: What Occupy Is Fighting for This May 1st,” AlterNet, 27 April 2012 (reprinted in Salon and Truth Out).
“Aid that Will Work in Haiti,” Op-ed, (Raleigh) News and Observer 15 January 2010: 15A.
Guest blog posts at Lawyers, Guns and Money, ACSBlog, and Edge of the American West.