Cristián Castro
Institute: Universidad Diego Portales
Title: Assistant Professor
Country/Region: Chile
Period: 2019/07/03 ~ 2019/07/26
Theme: A Transnational History of the Birth of Modern Earthquake Knowledge in the Pacific Rim, 1890s – 1920s.
Host: Kenji SATAKE
Introduction: I am currently Director of the School of History at Universidad Diego Portales, Chile. I received my B.A. in History from the University of Chile, and my M.A. and Ph.D. in History from the University of California at Davis. At ERI I will be collaborating with Prof. KENJI SATAKE. My project aims to compare three earthquakes that took place in the Pacific Rim during the first decades of the twentieth-century. First, focusing particularly on the responses, repercussions, and legacies of the Valparaiso and San Francisco earthquakes 1906, and secondly, analyzing the case of the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923. Drawing from scholars from Asia and the Americas, and building on disciplines from anthropology to architecture to seismology, but with our fundamental center in history, I will analyze these earthquakes to develop a path-breaking research on the transnational circuits of knowledge on earthquakes around the Pacific Rim, and in so doing, trace the origins of modern earthquake knowledge.
Fiscal Year: 2019