The project Disasters, Communication and Politics in Southwestern Europe: the Making of Emergency Response Policies in the Early Modern Age (DisComPoSE) investigates the connections between the circulation of news about natural disasters, the processing of information about such events and the development of emergency management policies.

DisComPoSE examines the European and extra-European territories of the Hispanic Monarchy between the 16th and 18th centuries, and intends to understand how specific interpretations of environmental disasters influenced the evolution of cultural frameworks, of social relations and of power structures in ancien régime societies.

The five-year project is financed by the European Research Council (ERC) and is hosted by the Department of Humanities of the University of Naples Federico II. It involves scholars from different fields: from social and cultural history to the history of institutions, from textual criticism to the history of language and images, from anthropology to the history of science.

News and Events

The DisComPoSE researchers participated in a session of the conference The Italian culture of the eighteenth century and its transnational connections, organized on 20th-22nd June 2023 in Naples, as part of the activities of the international project Rethinking Eighteenth-Century Italian Culture and Its Transnational Connections realized by the California State University, Long Beach, in collaboration […]

Three scholars who study the genre of press relations were the protagonists of the international seminar The reports on natural disasters between Italy and Spain in the seventeenth century, held on 23rd June 2023 at the Department of Humanities of the University of Naples Federico II. Mónica Martín Molares, a linguist specializing in the processes […]

On 5th and 6th October, the XVI International Seminar of History and Climate entitled Climate and Natural Disasters on both sides of the Atlantic from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Strategies of prevention and defence,  building of knowledge and narration  was held at the University of Alicante. This event is the result of the […]

Inside DisComPoSE

– Networks and Partnerships –

The DisComPoSE research group participates in the international APURIS project. Las administraciones públicas y los regios naturales en las monarquías borbónicas (siglos XVII-XIX), which brings together researchers belonging to three research groups working on the response of public institutions to environmental disasters in Spain, read more

Outcomes

DisComPoSE plans to create publications, international conferences, seminars, and a digital archive of the disaster writings, on a corpus consisting of thousands of texts, of different types and written in different periods and cultural contexts, which will allow to combine “distant reading” (that is, the analysis of large amounts of data) read more

– Database –

The digital archive of the disasters’ writings and images, currently in the development phase, will be freely available. The database will collect the transcriptions and reproductions of printed texts, manuscripts and visual representations of natural disasters occurring in the territories of the Spanish read more

This project has received funding from the European Research (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement N°759829

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