Disasters and the American State

Patrick S. Roberts is an Associate Professor at the Center for Public Administration and Policy (CPAP) in the School of Public and International Affairs at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. He is the Associate Chair and Program Director for CPAP, Northern Virginia. Roberts holds a PhD in government from the University of Virginia, and spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow, one at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, California and another with the Program on Constitutional Government at Harvard University, Massachusetts. He spent 2010–11 as the Ghaemian Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Heidelberg Center for American Studies in Germany. He has also been a reporter for the Associated Press. Roberts' work has been published in a variety of scholarly and popular journals including Studies in American Political Development, the Public Administration Review, the Journal of Policy History, Political Science Quarterly, Publius, Presidential Studies Quarterly, Administration and Society, the Public Organization Review, National Affairs, the Policy Review, American Interest, and USA Today. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the United States Naval Laboratories, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Social Science Research Council.

'[Roberts] has immersed himself with admirable thoroughness in the tangled story of how the federal government came to be the lead actor when disaster strikes. Above all, he develops a thoroughly persuasive historical and institutional explanation for how FEMA came to be a byword for bureaucratic incompetence - first, at the turn of the 1990s, then, more spectacularly, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.' Gareth Davies, The Forum

• 1. From disaster relief to disaster management; 2. The origins of the disaster state, 1789–1914; 3. Civil defense and the foundations of disaster policy, 1914–79; 4. The rise of emergency management and FEMA, 1979–2001; 5. Terrorism and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, 1993–2003; 6. 'Where the hell is the Army?' Hurricane Katrina meets the homeland security era; 7. Administrative evil and elite panic in disaster management; 8. Disasters and the American state.