After surviving Hurricane Katrina, Craig Colten retired as the Carl O. Sauer Professor of Geography at Louisiana State University and then moved to Asheville in spring 2024.  His attempt to escape Gulf Coast hurricanes was ill fated.  He has researched and written about the historical geography of hazards and disasters for over 40 years.  His book Unnatural Metropolis:  Wresting New Orleans from Nature (2005) explored the city’s three-century struggle to contend with an inhospitable setting and received /multiple awards.  His recent scholarship has examined the role of social memory in preparing for hazards, the spiraling impacts of compound disasters, and climate migration as adaptation to climate change.

Dr. Megan R. Underhill joined the Sociology and Anthropology Department at UNC Asheville in 2016 and now serves as department chair. Trained in both cultural anthropology and sociology, she describes herself as an inequality-oriented teacher and researcher. In the classroom, her courses focus on racial and class inequality in the United States and invite students to imagine how we might build a more just world. Megan began her research career as a disaster scholar examining issues of social vulnerability. Today, her work centers on how white parents teach their children about race and racism—a critical but often overlooked dimension of racial socialization. Her book manuscript, A Movement or a Moment: Antiracist White Parenting in the Time of Black Lives Matter, is forthcoming with Stanford University Press and draws on interviews with white parents from Asheville, North Carolina.