Re-Thinking Death Studies in Society: New Perspectives for the Next Fifty-Years

Dear colleagues,

Over the last fifty years, the academic study of death, dying and the dead body has become both excitingly new and intermittently dogmatic. This Special Issue on New Perspectives in death studies seeks essays that critically reflect on death studies as an academic field and look towards the future on what death studies might become. What will death studies entail for the next fifty years? Given that death is somehow always new, it makes sense that death studies will continue to thrive, but what might that future study of death, dying, and the dead body become? 

This Special Issue endeavors to understand what the future of the present is for the study of death, dying, the dead body, grief and bereavement, and human mortality. This Special Issue’s remit is unapologetically broad in order to encourage critical speculative thinking on what the future of death studies might turn into given new perspectives and concepts on what it means to live and die in the twenty-first century.

Dr. John Troyer
Guest Editor