Hurricane Katrina: Historians as First Responders

Hosted by Professor Tony Badger, Mellon Professor of American History and Master of Clare College, the lectures will explore the evolution of New Orleans by reflecting on its history and the events that have occurred since the floodwaters receded. Many of the speakers are historians at Tulane University, New Orleans, and their combined expertise will examine the issues of race, class, power and public policy that arise from Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath.

The lectures are open to the public. Reservations are not required.

Tulane-Cambridge Atlantic World Conference IV

Room 3, Faculty of History

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Thursday 25th May

5:00 Session I: Political Landscapes

Rebuilding New Orleans: A Darwinian Recovery?

Lawrence N Powell, Professor of History, Tulane University

The floodwaters of Katrina revealed as much as they covered. In New Orleans they uncovered the city's fragilities and its injustices. Today civic commissions and recovery authorities are still grappling with how to build a "new" New Orleans. For whose benefit will New Orleans be rebuilt? Can the city's ethnic and racial diversity--the foundation of its fabled enjoyment culture--be preserved without perpetuating deep-seated inequities? Lawrence N. Powell's summary history of New Orleans, as seen through the eye of Katrina, weighs these questions.

Friday 26th May

9:15 Session II: Historicizing Responses

Elite Designs and popular Uprisings: Building and Rebuilding New Orleans, 1721, 1788, 2005.

Emily Clark, Assistant Professor of History, Tulane University

This work examines the colonial history of rebuilding the city after disasters to illuminate the process underway in New Orleans today. Then, as now, the city that arose both materially and figuratively on the banks of the Mississippi often contested and sometimes confounded elite social, economic, and cultural designs.

American Sodom: New Orleans Faces Its Critics and an Uncertain Future.

Randy Sparks, Professor of History, Tulane University

Professor Sparks will examine the image of New Orleans as a city of sin and vice. It traces the rise of this image in the colonial/early national period up to the present. It shows that the city has, in fact, cultivated this image to promote tourism (the brothels of Storyville, jazz, Bourbon Street, Mardi Gras). Katrina demonstrated the dangers of this image, especially at a time when religious conservativism and political conservative are so strong.

11.15 Present Pasts: Vernacular Photography in the Wake of Catastrophes, 1945 Berlin – 2005 New Orleans.

Marline Otte, Assistant Professor of History, Tulane University

12:30 Break

1:30 Session III: Organising responses

The Civil Rights Movement and Organizing in Post-Katrina Louisiana: How contemporary movement scholarship fails miserably as a guide to action.

Lance Hill, Executive Director, Southern Institute for Education and Research, Tulane University.

They’re trying to wash us away: New Orleans musician responses to disaster. Bruce Raeburn, Curator, Hogan Jazz Archives, Tulane University

This presentation considers the situation of musicians who are attempting to put their lives and livelihoods back together after one of the greatest disasters in American history. When the neighbourhoods that serve as the "cultural wetlands" for such regionally distinctive festival traditions as "jazz funerals" and "second line" parades have been effaced, what are the cultural consequences and how can tradition be sustained? Where do musicians look for their answers, and how has disaster changed them?

3:00 Break

3:30 Session IV: Reflections on the Conference

Governance in New Orleans

Tony Badger, Mellon Professor of American History, University of Cambridge

Race in New Orleans

Adam Fairclough, University of Leiden

5:00 Finish

Sponsors: Mellon Fund for American History, University of Cambridge; Office of the Vice-Chancellor, University of Cambridge; Newnham College, University of Cambridge; Gulf South Regional Humanities Center Fund, Tulane University.

Programme Co-Chairs: Tony Badger, University of Cambridge and Emily Clark, Tulane University.