Wednesday 16:00-16:30 Laurie Taylor discusses the latest social science research.
12 March 2008 repeat 16 March
EURO-ISLAMAPHOBIA Pulitzer Prize winning historian David Levering-Lewis talks about his new book God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe 570-1215, a period during which “Islam and Christianity uneasily co-existed on the continent just beginning to be known as Europe”.
VIEWING THE RECENTLY DEAD In the past the parlour, or sometimes the kitchen table would be used to lay out the body of a recently deceased loved one or family member. But as attitudes changed, and the embalmers’ art developed, the funeral home became the new focus for a more formal kind of ‘viewing’. Laurie Taylor is joined by Sheila Harper and Kate Berridge author of Vigor Mortis: a cultural commentary on death to discuss how our responses to viewing the ‘recently dead’ have changed. Do we mourn differently? Do we still want to be confronted with the physical evidence of death?
Sheila Harper will be presenting the findings of her research at the forthcoming BSA Annual Conference in a paper entitled ‘Shh! Granddad is sleeping!: Viewing the recently-dead in England and the United States’.
Additional information:
David Levering-Lewis Professor of History at New York University and Pulitzer Prize winning historian
God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215 Publisher: W. W. Norton & Co. ISBN-10: 0393064727 ISBN-13: 978-0393064728
Lecture: A Counter-narrative: Islam and the first Europe Speaker: Professor David Levering-Lewis Date: Wednesday 12 March 2008 Time: 6:30-8pm Venue: Hong Kong Theatre, Clement House LSE, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE tel: 020 7405 7686
Orientalism Edward W. Said Publisher: Penguin Classics ISBN-10: 0141187425 ISBN-13: 978-0141187426
Sheila Harper, PhD Student Centre for Death and Society (CDAS), University of Bath
