Dr. Heather Hicks on Contemporary "Disaster Studies"

Some folks may be wondering what Villanova's English faculty has been up to in between Zoom meetings, doomsurfing the internet, and homeschooling their kids. As it happens, department chair Dr. Heather Hicks, whose second book was on contemporary post-apocalyptic fiction, has been busy working on an essay that turned out to be more topical than she had anticipated.

Dr. Hicks said: "I just wrote a whole article on "Disaster Response in Post-2000 American Apocalyptic Literature" for a Cambridge University Press volume on Apocalyptic Literature in American Literature and Culture. Now of course I wish I could write a post-script. But the point of the article is that Disaster Studies as a field indicates that most people are highly cooperative and compassionate during disasters, rather than taking up cudgels as per many post-apocalyptic visions. I think most of what has happened reflects this tendency for people to be mutually supportive, though the vigilantism toward wealthy people trying to hide out in their vacation homes is an interesting and complicated exception. And the way nations and states are turning on each other is also a wrinkle in the theory... But there certainly hasn't been a lot of crime or looting thus far."