Bethany Van Brown

Bethany Van Brown, an associate professor in the department of criminology and justice at Loyola University, New Orleans, earned her PhD in sociology from the University of Delaware. During her time there, she participated in projects about the movement of critical supplies after Hurricane Katrina, domestic violence and Hurricane Katrina, and improvisation after the September 11th World Trade Center terrorist attacks. Her dissertation, organizational response and recovery of domestic violence shelters in the aftermath of disaster, was selected as one of the Public Entity Risk Institute’s national fellows. Van Brown’s areas of expertise are social vulnerability and disasters, community resilience, disaster research methodology and crime and disaster. Her current projects include investigating freedom of speech in the classroom and the relationship between classroom climate and hate speech, and also best practices for research methodologies during the disaster emergency period.