Hi! I’m Jenn Trivedi.

I’m a Disaster Anthropologist, Applied Anthropologist, and Cultural Anthropologist.

I’m an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology, a Core Faculty Member at the Disaster Research Center (DRC), and hold a Joint Appointment in the Joseph R. Biden, Jr. School of Public Policy and Administration, all at the University of Delaware.

I’m a long-time member of the Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA) and I’m Program Chair of the 2027 Annual Meeting in Norfolk, Virginia.

What do I want to know?

I’m interested in long-term processes related to disaster recovery: how they begin long before the disaster itself starts and how they continue long after it ends. I’m curious about how people made decisions about disasters and what influences those decisions. And I want to know more about how processes and events that layer into disasters and recovery shape these further - be they compounding, cascading, co-existing, or layering and disasters, other major events or processes, or part of people’s daily lives.

Why anthropology?

I think anthropology can help us better understand people, their cultures, their power dynamics, and how they interact with each other and the world around them. I think it is a path that offers us a chance to learn about, listen to, and engage with others. I believe it can help us unpack larger questions about space and time, while also helping us communicate with more audiences about deeply critical issues that affect us in the past, present, and future. It’s why I’m not only an applied anthropologist, but also why I think being in the classroom and speaking and writing in a wide variety of venues matters.

I’m the author of Mississippi After Katrina: Disaster Recovery and Reconstruction on the Gulf Coast.

The book traces how what came before Hurricane Katrina deeply shaped what came after in Mississippi.

As Robbie Ethridge described “it is a spellbinding and wholly timely analysis of how natural disasters are not always natural.”