This course explores how collective, large-scale crises are defined, navigated, and represented. We will pay particularly close attention to the use of creative practices to analyze, address, and mitigate such upheavals. Our inquiry will focus on specific historical and contemporary health crises, environmental disasters, and national conflicts. We will study the antecedents of these events, read and listen to first person testimonies and reportage, and examine documentation of how people framed and responded to deeply unsettling and often catastrophic conditions. Crises are not confined to their most dramatic events. Indeed, the scars they leave may linger for generations. As we shift focus from crises that are, in some cases, distant from us, to those that touch us directly, we will consider our function as witnesses, scholars, artists, and participants. We will draw vocabulary and conceptual tools for our inquiry from work by historiographers of crises and theorists concerned with collective trauma, moral injury, and collective recovery.