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List of contributors
Douglas J. Davies, Professor in the Study of Religion and Director of the Centre for Death and Life Studies at Durham University, UK is an anthropologist and theologian working on ritual, symbolism, emotion, identity, and beliefs in connection with death, funeral ritual, Religious Studies, Mormonism and Anglicanism. Publications include Mors Britannica: Lifestyle and Death-Style in British Religion (2015), Natural Burial: Traditional-Secular Spiritualities and Funeral Innovation (with Hannah Rumble, 2012), Emotion, Identity and Religion (2011), The Theology of Death (2008), The Encyclopedia of Cremation (2005, with Lewis Mates), A Brief History of Death (2004), Death, Ritual and Belief, (2nd ed. 2002), and Reusing Old Graves (with Alastair Shaw, 1995). He is a Fellow of the UK’s Academy of Social Sciences, a Doctor of Letters of Oxford, and an Honorary Doctor of Theology of Uppsala University.
Kathryn A. Edwards is Professor of History at the University of South Carolina. She has published widely on late medieval and early modern folklore, common religious beliefs, and frontier societies. Among the works she has edited or written are Leonarde’s Ghost: Popular Piety and “The Appearance of a Spirit” in 1628 (2008) and Everyday Magic in Early Modern Europe (2015). She is currently finish a transnational history of beliefs about ghosts and related apparitions entitled Living with Ghosts: The Dead in European Society from the Black Death to the Enlightenment.
Andrea Marlen Esser is Professor of Practical Philosophy at the Friedrich-Schiller-University of Jena. Her main research interests are Philosophy of Kant and Plato, Pragmatism, Aesthetics, Political Philosophy and Philosophical Thanatology. She has published books and articles in Practical Philosophy and the Ethics of Kant as well as several articles on the philosophy of death and the status of the dead body. Currently she is Director of the
“Deutsche Gesellschaft für Philosophie” (DGPhil) and Co-Editor of the “Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie” (DZPhil).
Outi Hakola is a Docent and Senior Lecturer in Area and Cultural Studies at the University of Helsinki. She has a doctoral degree in Media Studies from the University of Turku. Her research focuses on representations of death, dying and mourning in films and television series. She is the author of Rhetoric of Modern Death in American Living Dead Films (2015), and editor of Death in Literature (2014, with Sari Kivistö).
Sara Heinämaa is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Jyväskylä. Her main areas of research are phenomenology of the body (mainly Husserl and Merleau-Ponty), philosophy of mind, history of philosophy, philosophical methodology and philosophical gender studies.
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Anna Lenkewitz is a researcher, currently writing her PhD thesis on “Just authority and social change in the Late Tsarist Empire” at the Ruhr-university Bochum. She holds a Master’s degree in History and Russian language from Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-university in Germany. Her main field of research is the history of justice in Russia by focussing on discourse analysis, cultural studies, and social movements. In 2014, she edited the source book Gerechte Herrschaft im Russland der Neuzeit, together with the professor of East European History at the Ruhr-university in Bochum, Stefan Plaggenborg.
John P. Lizza is a Professor of Philosophy and the Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania. His main philosophical interests are in bioethics, metaphysics, and philosophy of mind. He is the author of Persons, Humanity, and the Definition of Death (2006) and editor of Defining the Beginning and End of Life: Readings on Personal Identity and Bioethics (2009) and Potentiality: Metaphysical and Bioethics Dimensions (2014).
Jeff McMahan is White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Oxford. He is the author of The Ethics of Killing: Problems at the Margins of Life (Oxford, 2002) and Killing in War (Oxford, 2009). He has several other books forthcoming from Oxford University Press, including a collection of essays called The Values of Lives.
Ilona Pajari is a Doctor of Social Sciences working as a senior researcher in history in the department of History and Ethnology, University of Jyväskylä. Her research topics include death in wartime Finland, Finnish heroes and the history of Finnish funerals. She is the founding member and vice chair of the Finnish Death Studies Association.
Sami Pihlström is (since 2014) Professor of Philosophy of Religion at the Faculty of Theology, University of Helsinki. He has previously worked, e.g., as Professor of Practical Philosophy at the University of Jyväskylä (2006–2014) and as the Director of the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies (2009–2015). He has published widely on the philosophy of religion, metaphysics, ethics, pragmatism, and transcendental philosophy. He was the Principal Investigator of the Argumenta Project, “Human Mortality”, funded by the Finnish Cultural Foundation and hosted by the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies (2011–2013).
Hanna Ronikonmäki (M.Th.) is a doctoral student in philosophy of religion in the Department of Systematic Theology, University of Helsinki. She is currently preparing a dissertation on meaning and value of death in contemporary Anglo-American naturalistic philosophy.
Alexei Yurchak is an Associate Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of Anthropology.
He received his Ph.D. in cultural and linguistic anthropology from Duke University in 1997. His areas of expertise include Soviet history and the processes of post-socialist transformation in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe; political institutions and ideologies in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia; political philosophy and language philosophy; the interface between language/discourse and power; comparative studies of communism and capitalism anthropology of media; visual anthropology; experimental artistic scenes; urban geography and anthropology of space.
