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Scott Gabriel Knowles

Scott Gabriel Knowles is a historian of disaster worldwide. He focuses on the historical processes that make disasters possible, and the application of history to reduce future disasters. Since March 2020, Knowles has hosted #COVIDCalls, a live podcast discussion of the Covid-19 pandemic. He is publication series coeditor of "Critical Studies in Risk and Disaster" with the University of Pennsylvania Press. He is a professor in the Graduate School of Science and Technology Policy of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). He is author/editor of six books including Legacies of Fukushima: 3.11 in Perspective (with Kyle Cleveland and Ryuma Shineha; University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021) and The Disaster Experts: Mastering Risk in Modern America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).

His work on the history of risk and disaster has appeared in the Natural Hazards Observer, History and Technology, Journal of Policy History, American Scientist, Technology and Culture, and Engineering Studies—he has also written for The Hankyoreh, New York Times, Washington Post, Huffington Post, Slate, Conservation Magazine, U.S. News and World Report, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and The Hill. Knowles is completing two new books: The United States of Disaster; and Slow Disaster.

Latest posts

Accounting for Care in Times of Crisis

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In a pandemic, what counts as and how we count impact is fundamentally social and political. In their essay for our “Covid-19 and the Social Sciences” series, Robert Soden, Jacqueline Wernimont, and Scott Gabriel Knowles suggest that we must more accurately account for a broad range of ways in which the labor of caring is happening in response to the pandemic, from care of acutely ill patients to the work of mutual aid collaborators seeking to address social inequalities magnified by the pandemic. The authors call for multimethod research that allows for qualitative insight to give depth to quantitative data, in order to ensure that new policies address the underlying problems that may be obscured by numerical research alone.

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February 24, 2022

Beyond Simply “Lessons Learned”: Pandemic through the Disaster Lens

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Given the global impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, it seems a crucial time to reflect, from the perspectives of those who have studied disasters and public health crises, on social science’s insights and its potential impact (positive and negative). In this introductory essay to the “Disaster Studies” theme of our “Covid-19 and the Social Sciences” series, Alexa Dietrich and Scott Gabriel Knowles highlight how disaster research can shed light on the mutual effects of social inequality and disaster over time. Conversely, this theme will both explore how research through a disaster-focused lens can help us understand and address the preconditions and consequences that make the pandemic so devastating, and what can usefully be learned from the responses of institutions and communities worldwide that have most effectively reduced its impact, or that may signal hope for society’s future.

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May 21, 2020

The Other Uncertainty: The View from Disaster History

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Scott Gabriel Knowles opens our “Chancing the Storm” series with a reflection on how uncertainty—and an engagement with contingency and multicausality—has come to be embraced by historians, not least by those who study the history of disasters. Building on his own research on the history of engineering, Knowles emphasizes temporality and how disasters are both events and technological, environmental, and social processes that unfold slowly over time. Knowles also calls attention to space and scale, especially in the era of the Anthropocene, and how disaster history can make possible “a fusion of the analytical and the irrational—the graph and the story, the cost-benefit analysis and the social analysis” in ways that bring ostensibly opposing approaches together.

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July 23, 2019
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