Interdisciplinary Handbook of Trauma and Culture, 2016

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 Gu