CEHC Professor Edits New ‘Oxford Encyclopedia of Crisis Analysis’

By Mike Nolan

ALBANY, N.Y. (Oct. 20, 2022) — A new Oxford Encyclopedia edited by Eric Stern, a professor at the College of Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security and Cybersecurity (CEHC), is hitting bookshelves this month — after seven-plus years of collaboration.

The Oxford Encyclopedia of Crisis Analysis, a two-volume, 1,408-page publication is a one-stop shop for crisis studies and a number of closely related fields.

Stern serves as the editor in chief, bringing together experts in political science, public administration, management, international relations, public health, sociology, economics, media and mass communications, the law, and many other fields to explore the issues related to crisis and crisis management.

Among the articles is a review of Puerto Rico’s disaster response to Hurricane Maria, co-written by UAlbany President Havidán Rodriguez, who is a Puerto Rico native and leading expert in disaster science, and Maria Mora of the University of Missouri.

Other CEHC faculty contributors:

• Brian Nussbaum, associate professor, co-wrote an article with Brooke Turcotte, a PhD student in the School of Public Health, on cyber-interference in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election and teamed up with Stern to offer an overview of major critical infrastructure disruptions from the perspective of crisis management.
• DeeDee Bennett, associate professor, wrote an article on information and communication technology in crisis and disaster management.
• Gary Ackerman, associate dean and associate professor, and Douglas Clifford, program manager of the Center for Advanced Red Teaming, co-wrote an article on red teaming and crisis preparedness.

More than 100 experts contributed to the 84 total review articles and case studies that are included in the printed volume of the Encyclopedia. 

“Around seven years ago, I was contacted by one of the editors at Oxford University Press. He had the idea to publish an Oxford Research Encyclopedia that maps out the field of crisis studies in a way that had not been done before,” said Stern. “There was really no comprehensive overview of this field that existed. It was very fragmented.”

“We cast a fairly wide net, hitting on a lot of relevant topics through the contributions of leading and emerging scholars in different subfields.”

Oxford Research Encyclopedias are a collection of articles on a variety of topics, designed to give readers an overview of a subject that they can understand in half an hour of reading or less. Each article is rigorously peer-reviewed so the information is accurate, unbiased and up-to-date.

The new Crisis Analysis collection is a special project that falls under the umbrella of the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics. Along with the printed version, Stern worked with contributors to create an online version that has published full-length articles as they were finalized over the last few years.

Stern said the unique hybrid format helps with accessibility and allows the authors to make updates to their articles if they want to do so.

“We definitely took advantage of the hybrid publishing option,” Stern said. “The Encyclopedia is a living document, which gave contributors an opportunity to share their articles ahead of the printed version and make updates as their fields of expertise evolve.”

Stern, who also serves as the elected faculty chair at CEHC, has published extensively in the fields of crisis and emergency management, crisis communication, resilience, security studies, executive leadership, foreign policy analysis and political psychology. He actively seeks to bridge the gap between research and practice, collaborating regularly with federal, state and local government. For example, he works closely with the New York Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services and was recently named a 2022 FEMA Vanguard Leadership Fellow.

Contributors to the Oxford Encyclopedia of Crisis Analysis are made up of scholars from universities around the world, including associate editors from the Netherlands (Sanneke Kuipers, Leiden University), Sweden (Daniel Nohrstedt, Uppsala University), the U.K. (Denis Fischbacher-Smith, Glasgow University), Australia (Allan McConnell, University of Sydney) and the United States (Tom Preston of Washington State University).

The project was designed, planned and launched with support from the UAlbany Presidential Innovation Fund for Research and Scholarship.