Bio

Lori Peek is Associate Professor of Sociology and Co-Director of the Center for Disaster and Risk Analysis at Colorado State University. She also serves as the Associate Chair for the Social Science Research Council Task Force on Hurricane Katrina and Rebuilding the Gulf Coast. Her work focuses on socially vulnerable populations—including children, women, racial and ethnic minorities, and persons with disabilities—in disaster. She has conducted field research in New York City after 9/11, in Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina, and in Christchurch, New Zealand, after the 2011 earthquake. She and her collaborators are currently working on several funded research projects, including a longitudinal study of risk perception and evacuation behavior in hurricane-prone communities along the U.S. Gulf and Atlantic Coasts; an examination of innovative earthquake risk reduction activities in 11 cities in 7 different countries with high seismic risk; a state-wide survey of disaster preparedness among childcare providers in Colorado; a participatory project on children’s recovery after the Slave Lake fire in Canada and the Joplin tornado in the U.S.; and a five-year project on the health and social effects of the BP Oil Spill on children.

Dr. Peek is author of Behind the Backlash: Muslim Americans after 9/11 (Temple University Press, 2011) and co-editor of Displaced: Life in the Katrina Diaspora (University of Texas Press, 2012). In 2012, Behind the Backlash was selected as the recipient of the Distinguished Book Award from the Midwest Sociological Society. In 2009, the American Sociological Association Section on Children and Youth honored Lori with its Early Career Award for Outstanding Scholarship. At Colorado State University, she has won the Greek Life Professor of the Year Award, the Alumni Association’s Best Teacher Award, the College of Liberal Arts Excellence in Teaching Award, and the Waterpik Excellence in Education Award. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2005.

Current Classes

• SOC 205: Contemporary Race-Ethnic Relations – download syllabus
• SOC 463: Sociology of Disaster – download syllabus
• SOC 610: Methods of Qualitative Analysis – download syllabus