Faculty & Staff

Steve Kroll-Smith

Steve Kroll-Smith

Professor Emeritus
PhD, Pennsylvania, 1982

Office: 315 Graham
Email: s_krolls@uncg.edu

Courses Currently Taught

  • Disaster, Self and Society
  • Environmental Sociology
  • Advanced Topics in Social Psychology
  • Logic of Social Inquiry

Research Interests

  • Disaster and the Problem of Recovery
  • Individualism in American Social Thought
  • The Limits of the Concept in Sociology

Steve joined the UNCG Sociology Department in 2001. Prior to that time he was a Co-Director and Research Professor of Sociology at The University of New Orleans. From 2004 to 2010 he edited Sociological Inquiry. In 2004 Steve received the Distinguished Contribution Award for Research in Hazards and Disasters from the Environment and Technology Section of the American Sociological Society. Currently he is one of two Research Coordinators for the Social Science Research Council’s Project Katrina.

Selected Publications                              

 Books:

  • Kroll-Smith, Steve (2017, in press) Contingency and Miss Katrina, Telling About Disaster in Two New Orleans’ Neighborhoods. Austin: University of Texas Press.
  • Kroll-Smith, Steve, Vern Baxter & Pam Jenkins. 2015. Left to Chance: Hurricane  Katrina and the Story of Two New Orleans’ Neighborhoods. Austin, TX:  University of Texas Press. (Reviewed in the NYTimes and The Houston Chronicle) Nominated for the 2016 Association for Humanist Sociology’s Alfred McClung annual book award).
  • Volatile Places: Understanding Communities and Environmental Controversies (Newbury, CA: Sage Press, 2007, with Valerie Gunter)
  • Illness and the Environment:  A Reader in Contested Medicine (New York: New York  University Press, 2000, with Phil Brown and Valerie Gunter)

Articles/Chapters:

  • “A Tale of Two American Cities: Disaster, Class and Citizenship in San Francisco 1906 and New Orleans 2005,” Journal of Historical Sociology, in press (with Shelly Brown-Jeffy)
  • “Satire, Guns and Humans: Lessons from the Nacirema,” in Ben Agger, Editor, There is a Gunman on Campus: Tragedy and Terror at Virginia Tech. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, pp. 130-151, 2008 (with Gwen Hunnicutt)
  •  “Popular Media and ‘Excessive Daytime Sleepiness’: A Study of Rhetorical Authority in Medical Sociology,” Health and the Media. V 2, N 2: 108-125, 2003