Alice Fothergill

Alice Fothergill is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Vermont. Her areas of scholarship and teaching include disaster vulnerability, family and childhood studies, gender, inequality, service learning, and qualitative methods. She has worked in the disaster sociology field for 2 decades.

She and co-researcher, Professor Lori Peek of the University of Colorado, have recently completed a 10-year research study on children’s experiences in Hurricane Katrina. Their book, Children of Katrina, was published in 2015 by the University of Texas Press and has won multiple awards, including the American Sociological Association Children and Youth Section’s Outstanding Scholarly Contribution (Book) Award and the Association for Humanist Sociology’s Book Award.

Professor Fothergill is an editor of Social Vulnerability to Disasters, first and second editions. In the aftermath of Tropical Storm Irene in Vermont in 2011, she created service learning projects for her classes to help with the recovery. Her book, Heads Above Water: Gender, Class, and Family in the Grand Forks Flood examines women’s experiences in the 1997 flood in Grand Forks, North Dakota. She has also conducted research with Dr. Seana Lowe Steffen on volunteerism in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York City.

In 2017, she was a Fulbright Fellow at the Joint Centre for Disaster Research at Massey University in Wellington, New Zealand, studying disaster preparedness in childcare centers. She is currently a member of the Steering Committee for the Best Practices for IRB Review of Disaster Research, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS).