Death is a universal experience that unifies all. Meeting the End: A Panel on Death will bring together emerging scholars who study the experience of dying and grief through medical, art historical and artistic perspectives. Hannah’s research focuses on the community experience of death and mourning in Victorian Britain and how the introduction of modern medicine disrupted these rituals. Sidra’s work looks at how grief profoundly affects women who have to terminate abnormal pregnancies and advocates for a special categorization of post-traumatic stress disorders (PTSD) due to the resulting trauma and grief. In Unmapping Heteronormativity: Queering Death Through Art Practice, Devin’s artist talk performance centres on a social death of queer kinship and the forms of invisible grief which remain. Through this panel, we seek to engage in an open a conversation about death as well as forms of grief and mourning that bind our work together.

Moderator and Team Member: Claudia Hirtenfelder

  1. This modern death: the medicalization of death in Victorian visual and material culture (Hannah Darvin, Art History)
  2. Synopsis of the multidisciplinary impact of birth defects such as neural tube defects (Sidra Shafique, Department of Biomedical and Molecular Sciences)
  3. Unmapping heteronormativity: Queering death through art practice (Devin West, Cultural Studies)