Leveraging pop-culture appeal draws the public into the topic of disaster preparedness. Once there, people receive actionable advice—strategies for surviving a herd of cannibalistic night walkers are transferable to other, real-world catastrophes. It’s the reason the Maryland Department of Emergency Management sent out a recent tweet listing their must-have items for zombie armageddon. (“Chainsaws. Like a lot of chainsaws.”) Marcia Deppen, AS98, 00M, a director of consequence management for this department and a former emergency preparedness coordinator at UD, is a big proponent: “I once themed a presentation for foster kids in Wilmington around the rules of Zombieland, the Woody Harrelson movie,” she says, adding: “I love zombie everything.”

Now, professors on campus are incorporating zombie films into their curriculum—including Brad Pitt’s 2013 thriller World War Z—as a way to critically examine myths surrounding societal response to disaster. (Spoiler alert: People don’t devolve into mass hysteria, but that perception may lead officials to withhold crucial information from the public).

In a “Culture, Health and Environment” class taught by Anthropology Professor Jennifer Trivedi, students play a tabletop, role-playing game that she invented, requiring them to work in groups in order to survive an unfolding zombie apocalypse. As players succumb to the virus, pressure mounts. The experience thrusts the undergraduates—many of them aspiring emergency management practitioners—into greater identification with the fast-paced nature of decision making in an emergent situation. It also “brings a little joy,” into a discipline that, Trivedi says, can feel relentlessly heavy or—for students who've lived through actual disaster scenarios—triggering.