Featured Speakers

Dr. Julie-Marie Strange is Professor of British History at the University of Manchester. Her book Death, Grief and Poverty, 1870-1914 (CUP, 2005) was the first study of working-class responses to bereavement in Britain. This was followed by Fatherhood and the British Working Class, 1865-1914 (CUP, 2015). Co-authored books include The Invention of the Modern Dog: Breed and Blood in Victorian Britain with Mick Worboys and Neil Pemberton (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018) and The Charity Market: Humanitarianism in Britain, 1870-1912 with Sarah Roddy and Bertrand Taithe (Bloomsbury, 2018). She is currently working with Diane James of Blue Cross animal charity on pet bereavement and co-authoring a book on pets and family life with Jane Hamlett. Her new solo book project, Love in the Time of Capitalism, is a study of emotion in the making of the British working class. In October 2019, Dr. Strange takes up a new post as Professor of Modern British History at Durham University.

Dr. Ilona Pajari is a social historian of Finnish death, its rituals and social contexts in war and peace. Her research topics range from war death to secular burials and from manner guides’ etiquette instructions to cemetery design. She is the founding member and present Chair of the Finnish Death Studies Association and a co-editor of Thanatos, a peer-reviewed, online journal that promotes interdisciplinary research on death and dying. Recently, she has co-edited Suomalaisen kuoleman historia [The History of Finnish Death] (Gaudeamus, 2019) with Jussi Jalonen, Riikka Miettinen, and Kirsi Kanerva.

Dr. Erin Millions is an historian whose research focuses on the intersections of childhood, gender, material culture, and colonialism in Canada and the wider British Empire. She is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Winnipeg in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. Dr. Millions’ current research assesses the administration of death and burial of Indigenous child tuberculosis patients at two Manitoba Indian health care centres. This work is in response to community requests for assistance locating the burial sites of missing Indigenous patients. Dr. Millions and her postdoctoral supervisor, Dr. Mary Jane Logan McCallum, are also spearheading the Indigenous Histories of Tuberculosis in Manitoba Photo Project. The project uses social media and community engagement to bring previously inaccessible archival photos of Indigenous tuberculosis patients to survivors, families and communities as a way to facilitate both storytelling and repatriation.

Dr. Kaarina Koski is a folklorist specialising in the study of folk belief, narratives, and cultures of death. Her publications handle death rituals, belief legends on death, graveyards, Lutheran church, and supernatural beings, as well as questions of genre and narrativity, internet cultures, uncanny and supernatural experiences and their problematic interpretations. Her recent studies concern contemporary Finns’ imaginaries on the dead and afterlife. Koski holds a title of Docent in folklore studies (University of Helsinki) and folk belief studies (University of Turku). She is currently employed in the Finnish Academy research project “Northern Nightmares, 1400–2020” at the University of Helsinki.