Courses

This course explores how attitudes towards death and management of the dead transformed throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. How did scientific-medical development, secularisation, imperial expansion, rise of nationalism and rapid urbanisation affect how societies and individuals viewed death and treated the dead? Have death and the dead become increasingly invisible in the modern age? Do the dead still hold sacred power over us? To study such transformations on a global scale, this course looks into, compares and sees linkages of case studies from Asia, Europe and Latin America. It also guides students to uncover emotions, attitudes and cultural norms of people in the past from source materials.