Joshua DeVincenzo and Keithley Woolward
Hurricane Gonzalo's northern quadrant over Bermuda. Original from NASA. Image courtesy of Rawpixel.
During his Faculty Visitorship, Joshua DeVincenzo, Assistant Director for Education and Training at the National Center for Disaster Preparedness spoke to Keithley Woolward, Associate Director of the Masters in History and Literature program at Reid Hall, about the meaning of resilience, progress, and preparedness in the context of disaster management and sustainable construction both in the Caribbean and globally.
Joshua DeVincenzo is the Assistant Director of Training and Education and Adjunct Lecturer at Columbia Climate School’s National Center for Disaster Preparedness. Josh’s research interests examine the relationship between climate change and mental models. Josh’s expertise lies in developing lifelong learning experiences on disaster preparedness, mitigation, recovery, and resilience. He has created national-scale curricula in the United States on disaster financial literacy, economic impact analysis, and community partnerships. Josh aims to provide accessible and quality educational programming on a large scale, focusing on climate change and equity. He has published his work on climate pedagogy and cognition in esteemed journals and outlets such as the Journal of International Affairs, Routledge, State of Planet, and the Hill. Josh holds a master’s degree in Education Policy, Organization, and Leadership from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Bridging literary history and cultural studies, my teaching and scholarship focuses on the texts, images and cultural practices that constitute the anti-colonial and post-independence corpus of Francophone Africa and the Caribbean dating from the mid 1950’s to our contemporary moment. Deploying the tools of “postcolonial reading”—informed by African Diaspora; Contemporary Theory; Performance, Gender and Sexuality Studies—my research seeks to articulate and ground these multiple archival registers in geospatial contexts thereby rendering visible the complex interrelations and poignant cultural combinations of Africa and the Caribbean as spaces of representation and knowledge production.
Expanding my research interests to include a robust understanding of Public Economics and Development Policy implementation in the context of international multilateral organizations, I earned a Master of Public Affairs in Culture Policy and Creative Industries at Sciences Po, Paris (2018).
