Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Mortality and Its Timings: When Is Death?

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license.

This volume provides a series of illuminating perspectives on the timings of death, through in-depth studies of Shakespearean tragedy, criminal execution, embalming practices, fears of premature burial, rumours of Adolf Hitler’s survival, and the legal concept of brain death. In doing so, it explores a number of questions, including: how do we know if someone is dead or not? What do people experience at the moment when they die? Is death simply a biological event that comes about in temporal stages of decomposition, or is it a social event defined through cultures, practices, and commemorations? In other words, when exactly is death? Taken together, these contributions explore how death emerges in a series of stages that are uncertain, paradoxical, and socially contested.   

Shane McCorristine is a cultural historian with interests in the themes of mortality and modernity. Between 2013 and 2015 he was a Wellcome Trust Postdoctoral Fellow on the ‘Harnessing the Power of the Criminal Corpse’ project at the University of Leicester, UK.