Fault-tolerant programming languages / paradigms?
A good place to start looking for work coming from the PL community could be the following.


Joe Armstrong's work on Erlang, see e.g. his PhD thesis. This work continues to have a profound influence on programming language design, with Scala's integration of the Akka stack being a recent example. 
David Walker and his group's work on fault tolerance.
The numerous investigations into exceptions and exception handling, with a famous early publication being Randell's System Structure for Software Fault Tolerance. The literature on this subject is too large to survey.
Another strand of research is work on recovery oriented programming.