Matthew Mulcahy, Ph.D.
Dr. Matthew Mulcahy spends a good deal of time thinking about the impact of natural disasters in history. His first book, Hurricanes and Society in the British Greater Caribbean, 1624-1783, examined how British colonists made sense of the new and terrifying storms they encountered when they settled in places like South Carolina, Jamaica, and Barbados. He regularly teaches a course called Disasters in American History that examines past disasters from the colonial period until today and has students digging through newspaper and other primary sources to analyze a single calamity and its consequences. Dr. Mulcahy, who has been teaching history at Loyola University Maryland since 1999, graduated from Macalester College in 1990, then worked for two years at the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., before receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in 1999. In addition to Hurricanes and Society, he is the author of Hubs of Empire: The Southeastern Lowcountry and British Caribbean (2014) and is currently working on a broad survey of hurricanes, earthquakes, drought, and insect infestations in the early modern Caribbean.
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