Partial Synopsis: Great Flood stories span the ages through Indigenous South and North America, the Near East, the Greco-Roman world, Mesoamerica, India, the Philippines, and Rabbinic Judaism. Despite being one of the world’s oldest narratives, stories about Great Floods have yet to receive sustained critical attention and no synoptic analysis has brought together the precious adaptation and mitigation lessons within the anthropological, literary and historical intercultural responses to floods of the past nor explored their potential lessons for the present.

This PhD project will address this gap by investigating context-specific elements from flood stories that made the flood mitigation/adaptation options successful (or not) within sources such as the “earth-diver’ motif in the Northeastern United States, the Maya Deluge Myth and the Four Flood Myth Traditions of Classical China. The student will test various analytical lenses, including Freudian, history-of-religions, gender, comparative literary, and historic-geographic folklore approaches alongside flood resilience perspectives from the social sciences. Connections between the idea of flood and of pollution, tensions between literal versus symbolic floods and the elasticity of the flood myth will be significant points of departure.