Books

2021. Underwater: Loss, Flood Insurance, and the Moral Economy of Climate Change in the United States. Columbia University Press.

Journal Publications

2024. With Max Besbris, Daniel Aldana Cohen, and Ruthy Gourevitch.  "The housing regime as a barrier to climate action" npj Climate Action. ISSN 2731-9814 (In Press)

2024.  "The state and the state-of-the-art: prefiguring private insurance for U.S. flood risk" Socio-Economic Review. ISSN 1475-1461

2022. “The ‘Boomer Remover’: Intergenerational Discounting, Climate Change and the Coronavirus.” The Sociological Review 70(1): 74–91.

2021. With Ryan Hagen. “Disasters, Continuity, and the Pathological Normal.” Sociologica 15(1): 1-9.

2021. “Insurance and the temporality of climate ethics: Accounting for climate change in US flood insurance.” Economy and Society 50(2): 173-195.

2019. "‘Scarier than another storm’: Values at risk in the mapping and insuring of U.S. floodplains." British Journal of Sociology 70(3): 1067-1090.

2018. “The Sociology of Climate Change as a Sociology of Loss.” European Journal of Sociology 59(3): 301-337.

2017. "Gender and Green Consumption: Relational, Practical, Material." Journal of Consumer Ethics 1(2): 92-99.

2017. "Who Pays for the Next Wave? The American Welfare State and Responsibility for Flood Risk." Politics & Society 45(3): 415-440.

2013. “The taste for green: The possibilities and dynamics of status differentiation through “green” consumption.” Poetics 41(3): 294-322. 

Rebecca's first book, Underwater: Loss, Flood Insurance, and the Moral Economy of Climate Change in the United States, explores how families, communities, and governments confront problems of loss as the climate changes. It does so through the lens of the United States National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP): the key US institution that economizes flood hazards and losses, turning them into a matter of dollars and cents. Underwater was the co-winner of the 2022 Viviana Zelizer Book Award from the Economic Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association and received an Honorable Mention for the 2022 Alice Amsden Book Award from the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics. She is a recipient of the 2023 Philip Leverhulme Prize in Sociology.

Her current projects investigate questions of property value and climate change; assess the relationship between decarbonisation and regional inequality in the United Kingdom (with Dr Leon Wansleben and Dr Ned Crowley); examine the relationships between cultural commemoration, historical preservation, and climate change; and further develop the social theory of climate change.  

Rebecca is part of the Economic Sociology research cluster.

Rebecca teaches on the MSc Economy and Society programme and convenes a course on The Sociology of Consumption.

Rebecca is not taking on any new PhD students for 2025 admission.