Interdisciplinary Handbook of Trauma and Culture

Studying the aftermath of trauma is central to major disciplines including psychology, sociology, and literature. Throughout the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries, individual and societal responses to major trauma events such as wars and disasters have received increasing scientific attention. In this edited multidisciplinary volume, key societal, cultural, and religious domains of the human response to- and coping with- mass-trauma will be presented and discussed. Modern discourse of both the roots and the effects of violence perpetrated against individuals and collectives will be systematically discussed by leading international experts. Together, this collection of chapters will be resulted in a systematic examination of the cultural aspects of trauma in the art, religion, history, philosophy, gender, politics, architecture, economy and technology. The integration of the almost incommensurable ideas lays the foundation for a unique piece that aims to connect diverse worlds of content, often foreign to one another. We aim to broaden the discussion of the societal tools and toll of exposure to trauma by uprooting the discourse from its original context in psychological and medical research and extending the boundaries across a multitude of disciplines and theoretical fields. Due to its insightful nature across disciplines, the book will therefore appeal to multiple readerships that span across a variety of professional expertise, as well as shed new insights on this topic.?

Dr. David Gurevitz David Gurevitz is one of Israel’s most outstanding scholars in the field of cultural research. He heads the program in Media and Popular Culture in the School of Media Studies at the College of Management Academic Studies (COMAS) in Israel. Dr. Gurevitz has lectured at leading universities in Israel and abroad and spent two years as a Visiting Professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Dr. Gurevitz holds a Ph.D. degree, with honors, from Bar Ilan University, Israel. Among his key publications are “White Noise – Literature and Education in the Postmodern Era” and “Feminism and Postmodernism.” He completed his post-doctoral research at Harvard University. His primary area of expertise is postmodern culture and its ties to popular culture. His research focuses on the relations among ideological narratives in culture, law and the media. Dr. Gurevitz has authored the Introduction to a series of books title Postmodern Encounters (edited by poet Nathan Zach, 2002), and authored the following books: Postmodernism – Literature and Culture at the End of the Twentieth Century (1997); The Encyclopedia of Ideas (2012, co-authored with Dan Arav); and Detective as Culture Hero (2013). His upcoming book, Gangster-Chic: Crime, Culture and Capitalism, will be published in 2014. Together with Roni Levinger, he is now working on a book titled Communitrism and Literature, to be published during 2015.

Yochai Ataria
Yochai Ataria is a doctoral candidate at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a recipient of the Rotenstreich's Scholarship for Outstanding Doctoral Students. He is the author of a number of articles on various topics relating to different states of consciousness - mostly concerning the relationship between the sense of self, sense of time and the body during traumatic experiences. He also published several articles in which the relationship between cultural aspects (such as music, literature, and cinema) and trauma is being examined. His book, "The Mathematics of trauma", dealing with cultural aspects of trauma, will shortly be published by Gag publishing house. In addition he is co-editing, together with Professor Ziva Shamir, a volume of articles concerning Franz Kafka.

Professor Haviva Pedaya
Haviva Pedaya is Full Professor at Ben Gurion University of the Negev, where she teaches Judaism and Culture in the Department of Jewish History. She received her doctorate from the Hebrew University and is a graduate of the School of Visual Arts in Jerusalem. Her multi-faceted fields of research include the origins of the Kabbalah in Provence and Spain; the origins of Hassidut in the eighteenth century; ancient Jewish mysticism; apocalypolitics; myth and ritual. She is also involved in issues related to the history of the Jewish religion and culture. In her research into mysticism, in particular in the fields of sight and hearing and introversive and extroversive mysticism, she has created new paradigms. Among the central topics in her research are time and place; center and periphery; Messianism; and questions of language and linguistic form. She is also involved in critiquing literature and poetry and has published essays on principles in cultural criticism. Into all her research studies she incorporates a comprehensive perspective on issues of East and West while giving full consideration to varying trends, processes and spiritual as well as social forces.

Professor Yuval Neria
Yuval Neria is a Full Professor at Columbia University, Departments of Psychiatry and Epidemiology, and Director of Trauma and PTSD at the New York State Psychiatric Institute (NYSPI), in New York City. He received his BA degrees in Philosophy and Political Science and his MA degree in Clinical Psychology from Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and his PhD in Psychology from Haifa University, Israel (1994). Dr. Neria’s research has been focused on the mental health consequences of exposure to extreme traumatic events, their determinants, and underlying behavioral and neural basis. He is also highly interested in developing and testing innovative, neuroscience informed treatments for PTSD. Dr. Neria has led, and collaborated on, numerous epidemiological, clinical, and neuroimaging studies in PTSD, and his work is continuously funded by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), NARSAD and private foundations since 2002. Dr. Neria has authored more than 130 articles and book chapters, edited three textbooks published in Cambridge University Press, and a war-novel. He is the Editor in Chief of the journal Disaster Health (Landes Bioscience).