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4 ACUMEN • SPRING 2021 THE HUMANITIES their own resilience and mental health, the challenges they face, infrastructure usage and their perceptions of the state of their own communities. Part of the project is focused on how COVID-19 is affecting people’s sense of identification with their local communities and how those identities may serve a psychologically protective function, says Packer. “We are observing that COVID-19- related disruptions are associated with increased stress and anxiety,” he explains. “But people also perceive these disruptions as providing opportunities for their communities to rise to the challenge and to foster identity and cohesion, providing an important resource for resilience and recovery over time.” “The core interest of our research team has been understanding how people’s perception of a disaster influences recovery from that disaster,” Marsh says. “The COVID-19 pandemic is a continuously unfolding disaster. Thinking of it as such has given our team a unique perspective to explore people’s reactions and beliefs about the pandemic. We hope that our findings can help inform the ongoing and worldwide recovery from this devastating disease.” Work on the project will continue through August 2021. ENGLISH REIMAGINING ME At the end of the 19th century, British authors were producing an increasing number of speculative literatures, works that attempted to rewrite or modify aspects of life and reality. Michael Kramp argues these writers creatively yet consistently repaired, reestablished or renewed patriarchal power and privileges, attempting to ease cultural fears of a crisis of masculinity that could threaten white male authority. Kramp, professor of English, pulls from an extensive collection of Victorian writings about possible futures, rediscovered societies and alternative realities to PSYCHOLOGY UNDERSTANDING RESILIENCE Early last year, Jessecae Marsh, Dominic Packer and a team within Lehigh’s Institute for Cyber Physical Infrastructure and Energy (I-CPIE) were preparing to explore how human perception of recovery relates to community recovery from a natural disaster. The team had begun collecting metrics of infrastructure recovery for the areas of North Carolina affected in 2018 by Hurricane Florence, such as information about internet- and power-grid usage. The researchers then planned to conduct online surveys and in-person focus groups to ask affected individuals about their personal perceptions of their region’s recovery. The pandemic changed their plans. As COVID-19 spread, the team quickly pivoted. Shifting to a longitudinal study, the team received a second grant to support its work. Refocusing on the pandemic, the expanded project began investigating “the cognitive schemas that people bring to bear to make sense of the event and how meaning is made collectively within communities that people find relevant and central to their identities.” The team also assessed the behavioral responses participants reported to determine which actions are important for public health and community coordination and resilience. Joining Marsh and Packer were Paolo Bocchini, associate professor of civil engineering; David Casagrande, professor of anthropology; Brian Davison, associate professor of computer science and engineering; Alberto Lamadrid, the Class of 1961 associate professor of economics; Richard Sause, the Joseph T. Stuart professor of structural engineering; Daniel Abrahams, a postdoctoral researcher in I-CPIE; and Nick Ungson, research associate in psychology. Together, they wanted to better understand whether traditional metrics align with the lived experiences of people in recovering communities. The team initiated a multi-wave longitudinal survey of 2,500 U.S. residents and conducted in-depth phone interviews with citizens and key decision-makers in the Lehigh Valley, as well as counties in New Jersey and California. Questions focused on participants’ perceptions of BRIDGEMAN IMAGES uncover a prehistory of society’s modern obsession with “crises of masculinity.” His book, tentatively titled Reimagining Men, Reinscribing Patriarchy: The Masculinity of Late Nineteenth-Century British Speculative Fiction , assesses utopian novels, hidden earth accounts, lost world and science fiction stories, and invasion tales to demonstrate a combined failure to visualize nonpatriarchal models of masculinity. Kramp argues that this cultural catchphrase of “crisis” drove a social desire to renew patriarchal masculinity in the hope that such men might restore nostalgic stability to the nation. “What we see during this period is an attempt to shore up the notion of masculinity,” he says. “Culturally, we have failed to imagine masculinity that would not be patriarchal. At the same time, patriarchy has been enormously successful at being creative and coming up with ways to recreate itself.” This enormously inventive and diverse literary genre—which he notes envisioned innovative economic and political systems; amazing technologies; alternative educational, medical and religious structures; and truly radical ways of organizing life, including feminist utopias—ultimately employs a variety of fictional techniques and narrative devices to restore patriarchy. Kramp adds that his focus on British speculative fiction during this period demonstrates how even this form of literature remains incapable of fabricating nonpatriarchal men. These texts still creatively reconstitute male powers and privileges. “When I started researching and writing, I thought I’d write a book about how this speculative literature could imagine a different sense of masculinity, a new, innovative method,” he says. “What I’ve discovered instead is a period BRIEFS Michael Kramp argues patriarchy in literature has been successful at perpetuating itself.