The Humanities Graduate Student Association (HuGSA) and the Graduate Program in Humanities at York University are pleased to announce an interdisciplinary conference interrogating the enduring human fascination with death, dying, and the dead— in senses both figurative and literal—encompassing the many cultural moments of the human experience. Despite the prevalence of morbidity and representations of death as a part of everyday experience, the study of death remains overshadowed by research frameworks which are primarily sociological or medical, or which centre on policy and law—the practical concerns of dealing with death and dying as part of all societies. That said, death as a ubiquitous human cultural phenomenon has received considerably less critical attention. As well, because scientific and medical study of death has advanced, suggesting new possibilities for postponing it, questions about human responses to the prospect of death—and its evolving meaning—become ever more societally foregrounded. Situating death as its critical theme, this conference seeks to attract and share research from across a range of disciplines within the humanities, as well as from the social sciences, education, science and medicine. Providing a platform for graduate students and early-career researchers to present and discuss their research, the conference’s secondary aim is to contribute to a growing network of researchers and work that engages with death in new and unconventional ways.
Forrest Johnson