After something of an unintended blogging hiatus – the end of project funding and being back into teaching is to blame – we’ve had good news. As part of the ongoing collaboration with the Grief Series, this spring will see us welcome a group of artists from the Faro de...
Laura King, University of Leeds Any good collaboration should be mutually beneficial – ‘which is a formal way of saying bloody lovely’. So said Ellie Harrison in a talk we gave about how we’ve worked together, at the University’s ‘Impact in 5’ evening last week, which showcased collaborations between academics...
Jessica Hammett (University of Leeds) with Ellie Harrison (The Grief Series) This blog post is about how we care for our participants and how we care for ourselves when we do public engagement work, especially when we are researching difficult topics; in the case of this project death, grief and...
Laura King, University of Leeds How can we best communicate and share our research? As academic historians, our writing is always going to be crucial. Our books and essays for fellow academics are our bread and butter, increasingly peppered with blog posts, tweets and articles written with the hope of...
Jessica Hammett, University of Leeds It’s been just over a month since we got back from the Journey with Absent Friends – a month long pilgrimage with Perle the caravan, between sites of personal significance for artist Ellie Harrison – and we have been reading through the beautiful and moving...
We know that the smell and taste of a slice of gingerbread, a tangy curry, or a sip of homebrew can take us back to a particular moment in our past like almost nothing else. Our senses, of smell particularly, and taste too, make food one of the most evocative...
During June, the ‘Living with Dying’ project are going on a Journey with Absent Friends with artist Ellie Harrison and ‘Team Grief’. In an ordinary, domestic caravan, we’ll be travelling from Leeds, to Oxford, Poole, Hamburg, Stockton and the Isle of Arran, to think about where the memories of the dead...
A guest blog from Laura Loyola-Hernández In the last two decades, Halloween marketing around the globe has appropriated Día de los muertos (Day of the Dead). Nowadays, it is very common to find in stores across the UK some type of imagery or costume associated with Día de los muertos. While...
A conference to explore historical and contemporary perspectives. Bringing together, artists, academics and professionals working in a range of services relating to end of life, this conference will consider how space plays a role in practices of remembrance in the past and present, and in different cultures across the world....
In his book ‘A grief observed’ C.S Lewis wrote: “Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape. As I’ve already noted, not every bend does. Sometimes the surprise is the opposite one; you are presented with exactly the same sort...