Interdisciplinary Handbook of Trauma and Culture

This lofty volume analyzes a circular cultural relationship: not only how trauma is reflected in cultural processes and products, but also how trauma itself acts as a critical shaper of literature, the visual and performing arts, architecture, and religion and mythmaking. The political power of trauma is seen through US, Israeli, and Japanese art forms as they reflect varied roles of perpetrator, victim, and witness. Traumatic complexities are traced from spirituality to movement, philosophy to trauma theory. And essays on authors such as Kafka, Plath, and Cormac McCarthy examine how narrative can blur the boundaries of personal and collective experience.

Among the topics covered: 

Television: a traumatic culture.
• From Hiroshima to Fukushima: comics and animation as subversive agents of memory in Japan.
• The death of the witness in the era of testimony: Primo Levi and Georges Perec.
• Sigmund Freud’s Moses and Monotheism and the possibility of writing a traumatic history of religion.
• Placing collective trauma within its social context: the case of the 9/11 attacks.
• Killing the killer: rampage and gun rights as a syndrome.

This volume appeals to multiple readerships including researchers and clinicians, sociologists, anthropologists, historians, and media researchers.  

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 Post-Doc at the Weizmann Institute of Science (Neurobiology Dept) under the supervision of Dr. Amos Arieli and Prof. Rafael Malach. Yochai has written a number of articles on various topics relating to altered states of consciousness, mainly concerning the relationship between the sense of self, the sense of time and the sense body during traumatic experiences. He has also published a number of articles regarding the meditative experience.

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 160 articles and book chapters, and co-edited three textbooks published in Cambridge University Press, and a war-novel.