Uncover the strange and fascinating history of how humans have faced, marked and made sense of death. Followed by Q&A.

Why do we bury our dead the way we do? Where did death masks, mourning rituals and even grave robbing come from – and what do they tell us about how different societies have understood mortality? In this talk, Joan Passey traces the history of death across cultures and centuries, exploring the rituals, superstitions and practices that have shaped how humans confront the one certainty we all share.

We'll uncover the dark and surprising history of grave robbing and the rise of anatomy science, the evolution of funeral rites and mourning customs, and the strange tradition of the death mask. Along the way, we'll ask what these practices reveal about the societies that created them – and what our modern relationship with death still owes to the past.

Doors open at 7pm, talk starts at 7:30pm - come down early to grab a good seat!

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Speaker Bio:

Dr Joan Passey is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Bristol where she specialises in the gothic, horror, and folklore in literature and culture. She has a Masters from the University of Oxford and a PhD from the University of Exeter, both focusing on the gothic and the supernatural. She is a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker and regularly contributes to and presents for BBC Radio 3, and has spoken at Hay Festival and from the BBC Proms. She edits anthologies for the British Library Tales of the Weird series, with titles including Cornish Horrors: Tales from the Land's End, Our Haunted Shores: Tales from the Coasts of the British Isles, and Phantoms of Kernow: Tales from Haunted Cornwall. Her monograph, Cornish Gothic, 1830-1913 (University of Wales Press, 2023) was the first to define a Cornish Gothic tradition in the nineteenth century, and she co-edited Shirley Jackson's Dark Tales: Reconsidering the Short Fiction (Bloomsbury, 2024) with Robert Lloyd.

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