ASDS Ambassadors
ASDS Ambassador for Scandinavia
Alfred Thomas Bordado Sköld
Alfred Thomas Bordado Sköl' Aalborg University' Denmark
Alfred Bordado Sköld carries a MA. Philosophy and a MSc in Psychology from the University of Copenhagen' Denmark. He has worked within the areas of continental philosophy' existential phenomenology and psychoanalysis. His present affiliation is within the research center The Culture of Grief at Aalborg University' that investigates the existential and sociocultural aspects of bereavement following the diagnosing of Prolonged grief disorder in ICD-11. Alfred's Ph.D.-project consists of a longitudinal interview study of bereaved partners in different generations' whereby he explores the socio-ontological aspects of losing a life partner. His interest also covers death studies more generally' the philosophy and psychology of love as well as critical happiness studies.
ASDS Ambassador for the Netherlands
Brenda Mathijssen
Brenda Mathijssen University of Groningen' the Netherlands
Brenda is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Groningen' the Netherlands. She has an expertise in death studies' psychology of religion and anthropology of religion. By investigating death in contemporary societies' she aims to more fully understand funerary and bereavement processes. Moreover' she seeks to unpick people's complex and everchanging meaning and belief systems.
Brenda has previously worked on ritual creativity' secularisation and death in the Netherlands (Radboud University Nijmegen)' and has been part of an AHRC-ERSC project on deathscapes and religious-ethnic plurality in the UK (University of Reading). She is affiliated to the Centre for Thanatology (Nijmegen)' the Centre for Death and Life Studies (Durham University) and the European Research Network on Death Rituals.
Email: Brenda.mathijssen@rug.nl
Publications Mathijssen' B. & Venhorst' C. (2019). Funerary practices in the Netherlands. Bradford: Emerald. Mathijssen' B. (2017). Making sense of death. Ritual practices and situational beliefs of the recently bereaved in the Netherlands. Münster: Lit Verlag. Mathijssen' B. (2018). 'Transforming bonds. Ritualising post-mortem relationships in the Netherlands'. Mortality. 23 (3) 215-230. Maddrell' A.' Beebeejaun' Y.' McClymont' K.' McNally' D.' Mathijssen' B & Abid Dogra' S. (2018). 'Paisatges funeraris i diversitat a Anglaterra i a Gal·les: l'establiment d'una agenda' ['Deathscapes and Diversity in England and Wales: setting an agenda']. La Revista d'Etnologia de Catalunya. 43. 39-53. Mathijssen' B. (2017). 'The ambiguity of human ashes. Exploring encounters with cremated remains in the Netherlands'. Death Studies. 41 (1). 34-41.
ASDS Ambassador for Finland
Maija Butters
Maija Butters' University of Helsinki' Finland
Maija K. Butters (maija.butters@helsinki.fi) is a cultural anthropologist working in the doctoral program of History and Cultural Heritage at the University of Helsinki' Finland. She teaches on death cultures and rituals in various religious and cultural traditions' and her dissertation study is on contemporary death and dying in Finland. In this ethnographic study' she focuses on the various cultural means that terminally ill people employ in order to handle their mortality. She has written on the metaphysical meaning of aesthetic experiences in the face of death' and currently she is exploring rituals and ritualization around dying patients in hospital and hospice surroundings. Her dissertation also includes a discussion on contemporary care system and healthcare politics in Finland. Maija is involved with hospice education' and she lectures on culturally and religiously sensitive patient care in hospitals and at medical conferences. Previously she has published on Buddhist art and Tibetan culture' and she has also written on the embodied experiences of becoming a mother. Various philosophical and anthropological themes' such as embodiment' rituals' aesthetics' suffering and joy' are close to her heart.
Email: maija.butters@helsinki.fi
ASDS Ambassador for Finland
Ilona Pajari
Ilona Pajari' Finnish Death Studies Association' Finland
Dr. Ilona Pajari (née Kemppainen) is a social historian of Finnish death' its rituals and social contexts in war and peace. Her research topics range from war death to death notices and from manner guides' etiquette instructions to cemetery design. Pajari 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 edited Suomalaisen kuoleman historia [The History of Finnish Death] (Gaudeamus' 2019). Her latest study considers secular burials in Finland from the beginning of the 20th century to the present. Pajari is an independent historian.
ASDS Ambassador for Cyprus
Polyxeni Stylianou
Polyxeni Stylianou' Primary Teacher & Independent Researcher' Cyprus
Polyxeni Stylianou is a primary teacher and a researcher. She received her MA degree in Education (Psychology) from the Institute of Education (University of London) and her doctorate in Theory of Education and Curriculum from the Open University of Cyprus. Her research interests mainly cover the integration of the concepts of death' loss and grief in primary education. She has been working as a teacher in public primary schools in Cyprus since 2001. She delivers conference presentations both nationally and internationally (e.g. DDD12' DDD13' DDD14' 40th ADEC Conference) and she publishes articles in scientific journals. She had worked for three years as a teacher trainer at the In-Service Training Department of the Cyprus Pedagogical Institute offering seminars both to teachers and parents and editing educational material relevant to Death Education. Currently she is working on two projects. The first one is on approaching grief issues through children's literature. One of the purposes of this project is to explore teachers' and children's attitudes and reactions on the implementation of relevant suggested lesson plans and based on them to make assumptions on Death Education based on empirical data. The second project is on discussing History with children through war graves. The main aim of this project is to discuss the consequences of wars focusing on life and people.
ASDS Ambassador for England
Sue Chard
Sue Chard Independent Celebrant' England
Sue lives near Stroud in Gloucestershire with her husband has two daughters and a grandson. She has been an Independent Celebrant for 17 years offering people support in creating a funeral rite that works for them. It can be secular' religious or Seculigious (Chard' 2016) in nature. In 2017' she completed a MSc at CDAS University of Bath in which she considered how the initial narrative between Funeral Director/arranger and those arranging a funeral affects the final funeral rite and what can be offered to ensure people receive the ceremony they hoped for. She is considering starting a PhD on her interests in contemporary funeral rites and especially the changing face of the twenty first century English funeral.
ASDS Ambassador for Italy
Mattia Petricola
Mattia Petricola' University of Bologna' Italy
Mattia Petricola has recently completed a PhD in comparative literature and literary theory at the University of Bologna. His research interests lie at the intersection of thanatology' fantastic fiction' cultural history' and category theory. He has published articles on Philip K. Dick' Peter Greenaway' queer approaches to the polarity life-death' and the notion of spectrality in video art. He is the Italian ambassador for ASDS.
ASDS Ambassador for Romania
Adrianna Teodorescu
Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
Adriana Teodorescu is an Associate Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Babesş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania. She received a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature in 2011, and she is currently enrolled in a second Ph.D. program in Sociology since 2016. In March 2016, she organized a seminar on death in literature, at Harvard University, as part of the American Comparative Literature Association's Annual Meeting. She is also co-organizer of the annual "International Conference Dying and Death in 18th-21st Century Europe", Romania, since 2010. Editor of "Death within the Text: Social, Philosophical and Aesthetic Approaches to Literature" (2019) and "Death Representations in Literature. Forms and Theories" (2015), Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Co-editor of "Death in Contemporary Popular Culture" (with Michael Hviid Jacobsen), Routledge, 2019. Co-editor of the "Dying and Death in 18th-21st Century Europe" volumes, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011 and 2014 (with Marius Rotar). Vice-president of The Romanian Association for Death Studies. Her fields of interest include, in addition to death studies, the sociology of ageing and old age, gender studies, comparative literature, and cultural studies.
Contact: adriana.teodorescu@gmail.com
ASDS Ambassador for India
Khyati Tripathi
Khyati Tripath, University of Delhi, India
Khyati Tripathi is a Doctoral Fellow in the Department of Psychology at the University of Delhi, India. She was awarded the Commonwealth split-site scholarship 2016-17 to spend a year of her PhD in the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. After completing her B.A (H) and M.A in Psychology from the University of Delhi, she completed an M.Phil. in Social Anthropology and then went on to pursue her PhD in Social and Cultural Psychology. She has been awarded Research Fellowships by the University Grants Commission as well as the Indian Council of Medical Research in India. She has just submitted her PhD thesis which focuses on the cultural construction of the dead in Hinduism and Judaism through culture-specific death rituals and mortuary techniques.
Email: khyatitripathi27@gmail.com
ASDS Ambassador for Australia
Hannah Gould
Hannah Gould, University of Melbourne, Australia
Hannah Gould is a cultural anthropologist specialising in death and discarding, material culture, and religion. She currently works as Research Fellow with the DeathTech Research Team, an interdisciplinary group of scholars examining death, technology, and social change in the twenty-first century, based at The University of Melbourne and Oxford University. Her work spans the emergence and decline of ritual traditions and technologies of death, the lifecycle of religious materials, and modern minimalist movements. Hannah holds a MSc Visual, Material and Museum Anthropology from Oxford University and PhD Cultural Anthropology from The University of Melbourne. She is the recipient of the Japan Foundation Fellowship, the Dyason Fellowship, and the Rae & Edith Bennet Scholarship, and her work has been published in Anthropological Quarterly, FOCAAL, Journal of Material Religion, and Death Studies.
ASDS Ambassador for France & Quebec, Canada
Martin Robert
Martin Robert, University of Oxford
Martin Robert is a historian currently based at the University of Oxford, where he is a Research Fellow in the History of Medicine at the Oxford Center for the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology (OCHSMT), and Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College. Martin has coauthored with Laura Tradii (University of Cambridge) the article Do We Deny Death? (part I and part II) published in Mortality. He has also published on the advent of funeral cremation in Europe and Canada in Histoire sociale / Social History. Martin's monograph La fabrique du corps médical. Dissections humaines et formation médicale dans le Québec du XIXe siècle [On the Fabric of the Medical Body. Human Dissections and Medical Education in 19th-century Quebec] is under review at McGill-Queen's University Press.
'Feel free to contact me about the history of death or medicine, anatomical dissections or cremation, or if you have any queries about death studies in France or Quebec.'
Academic page: https://www.hsmt.ox.ac.uk/people/dr-martin-robert
ASDS Ambassador for Japan
Aki Miyazawa
Aki Miyazawa, University of Tsukuba, Japan
Aki Miyazawa is a religious sociologist specializing in death, funerals and graves in contemporary societies. She is currently completing her PhD at the University of Tsukuba, Japan. Her research interests focus on natural burial movements around the world, especially natural burial in the UK and tree burial in Japan. She questions why such phenomena have occurred in many countries at a similar time, despite the many and varied differences of historical, social, cultural and religious backgrounds. Aki suggests the decline of existing belief systems and the emergence of new ecological ethics in such areas where natural burial movements have occurred, while the forms of natural burial can only be understood within context. Aki holds a Master of Literature from the University of Tsukuba. She was also a Fellow with the JSPS Research Fellowship for Younger Scientist (DC2) in 2018-2019, and a Visiting Research Fellow at CDAS during 2019.7-2019.12, funded by JSPS.
ASDS Ambassador for Russia
Sergei Mokhov
Sergei Mokhov, John Moores University, Liverpool
Sergei Mokhov (svmohov.hse@gmail.com) is a cultural and historical anthropologist working on a postdoctoral position at Liverpool John Moores University and as a research fellow in Center of medical anthropology, Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, Russian Academy of Science. Sergei defended his PhD in sociology at the Higher School of Economics (Moscow, Russia). He was an Oxford Russia Fellow with a project on the Russian palliative care system in 2018-2019. His current project focuses on Soviet oncology and the care for dying people in the late USSR. His broad research interests include different historical and cultural aspects of death and dying: the funeral industry, cemeteries, ageing, the hospice movement and palliative care, cancer culture. Mokhov is the author of "The Birth and Death of the Funeral Industry: From Medieval Graveyards to Digital Immortality" (in Russian; Common Place, 2018). He was awarded the Alexander Piatigorsky Literary Prize (VI season, 2018–2019) for this book. Sergei is also the author of "The Brief History of Death" (in Russian; Individuum, 2020), which has just been nominated for the 'National bestseller' Literary Prize 2021. Sergei is a popular expert guest in the Russian print and mass media, including Afisha, The Village, the Economist, the TV channels Kultura and Dozhd', as well as Mayak and Radio Liberty radio stations. Sergei has been a publisher and editor of "The Archeology of Death in Russia" since 2015.
Email: svmohov.hse@gmail.com
ASDS Ambassador for USA
Sarah Gurley-Green
Sarah Gurley-Green, Salem State University, Massachusetts
Sarah Gurley-Green is a lecturer at Salem State University, part of the University of Massachusetts in the USA. She currently teaches healthcare systems, sociology of healthcare, health equity, and writing for healthcare. Her research areas include the narrative in health and healthcare, inequality in healthcare, experience of chronic illness, and death, dying, and bereavement in the US. Her perspective on the US is both as an insider and outsider as she lived half her adult life in London where she worked as a healthcare advocate and researcher.
ASDS Ambassador for Portugal
Susana de Noronha
Susana de Noronha, University of Coimbra, Portugal
Susana de Noronha, anthropologist, PhD in sociology, is researcher and co-coordinator of the Science, Economy and Society Research Group (NECES) at the Center for Social Studies (CES), University of Coimbra, Portugal, and is also Professor in the Network of Social Sciences Post-Graduate Programs of the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO). Winner ex aequo of the 2007 CES Award for Young Portuguese-speaking Social Scientists and of the 2003 Bernardino Machado Award for Anthropology, by the University of Coimbra. Author of three pioneering books regarding the depiction of cancer experiences in the visual and plastic arts, from stage I cancers to terminal malignancies, her working field since 2005 - A tinta, a mariposa e a metástase: a arte como experiência, conhecimento e acção sobre o cancro de mama (2009, Afrontamento); Objetos feitos de cancro: mulheres, cultura material e doenças nas estórias da arte (2015, Almedina); and Cancro sobre papel: estórias de oito mulheres portuguesas entre palavra falada, arte e ciência escrita (2019, Almedina). She is also a published lyricist and author of scientific illustrations, using photography, painting and creative ethnographic drawing.
Research interests: Art, Cancer, Death and Resistance; Medical Anthropology; Anthropology of Art; Material/Visual Culture Studies; Creative Ethnographic Drawing.
Email: susananoronha@ces.uc.pt
ASDS Ambassador for Turkey
Murat Ergin
Murat Ergin, Koç University, Istanbul
Murat Ergin is associate professor of Sociology at Koç University, Istanbul. He received his PhD in Sociology from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis in 2005.
Research interests: revolve broadly around the formation of cultural boundaries and identities, and include research on culture and cultural consumption; nationalism, race, and ethnicity; crime and deviance; technology; and death
ASDS Ambassador for Ukraine
Halyna Herasym
Halyna Herasym, University College Dublin
Halyna is a Ph.D. student in sociology at University College Dublin and a researcher at Ukrainian Center for Law and Crime Research. Halyna works as an educator and works as a sociology lecturer at the Projector project. She is passionate about qualitative methods and the history of sociological thought.
Her research is focused on inequalities, marginalization, and social exclusion within the death system.
ASDS Ambassador for Bangladesh
Md Ilias Kamal Risat
Md Ilias Kamal Risat, Brighton and Sussex Medical School
Md Ilias Kamal Risat is a PhD researcher in medical anthropology/social anthropology at the Brighton and Sussex Medical School in the UK. His PhD is exploring cultural understanding of 'good death' amongst the healthcare providers, dying patients and the family caregivers in the palliative care centres of Bangladesh. While doing the fieldwork in the middle of covid-19 pandemic, he also explored how covid-19 affected the end-of-life care provisions in Bangladesh. He is interested to looking at death studies from a post-colonial perspective in his thesis. He delivered presentations in both DDD14' and DDD15' conferences on his ongoing research.
Previously, he worked as a research assistant in a community palliative care project in a slum in Dhaka, Bangladesh. He completed his undergraduate and masters programme in Sociology from the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh.
ASDS Ambassador for Ireland
Jennifer Moran Stritch, MSW
Jennifer Moran, Limerick Institute of Technology
Jennifer Moran Stritch is a lecturer in the Department of Applied Social Sciences at Limerick Institute of Technology. Jennifer lectures in Personal Development and Challenging Behaviour modules and created the Working with Older People/Positive Ageing elective module in 2015 as part of the BA (Hons) in Social Care Work degree programme.
In addition to teaching at LIT, Jennifer is a module coordinator for the Royal College of Surgeons Ireland/Irish Hospice Foundation MSc in Bereavement Studies and has guest lectured at Maynooth University, National University of Ireland - Galway, Mary Immaculate College Limerick and University of Limerick Graduate Entry Medical School. Having trained as a social worker in the United States, she is a frequent speaker and workshop facilitator in Ireland and internationally on death education and experiences of loss across the lifespan.
Jennifer is the founder and primary principal investigator for the Loss and Grief Research Group, part of the Social Sciences ConneXions Research Institute. In November 2015, Jennifer hosted "Death Cafe Limerick", the first Death Cafe event in Ireland outside of Dublin.
Jennifer is a member of the Association for the Study of Death and Society, the Irish Childhood Bereavement Network, Dementia Research Network Ireland and is a Certified Thanatologist (CT) with the Association for Death Education and Counselling. She is the former chair of the Midwest Traveller Health Unit committee for the HSE Office of Social Inclusion and represents Limerick Institute of Technology on the Clare Age Friendly Alliance Board.
Contact Details Jennifer.stritch@lit.ie
Phone: 011-353-85-726-6830
Twitter: @stritchj and @sscatLIT (Social Sciences ConneXions Research Institute)
Facebook: Death Café Limerick and Personal Development - Jennifer Stritch
Linked In: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifermoranstritch/
ASDS Ambassador for New Zealand
Dr Jessica Young
Dr Jessica Young, post-doctoral researcher at the School of Health, Te Herenga Waka
Dr Jessica Young is a Cancer Society of New Zealand post-doctoral researcher at the School of Health, Te Herenga Waka - Victoria University of Wellington. Her expertise is in the sociology of health, illness, medicine and dying. Building on her PhD from the University of Otago, which focussed on the wish to hasten death among people with life-limiting illnesses, Jessica is researching the experiences of people applying for assisted dying and those who support them as well as the experiences of people with life-limiting cancer who have declined hospice services. She established and is leading an independent, multidisciplinary assisted dying research network, funded by the Health Research Council. Jessica has been appointed by the Minister of Health to the Support and Consultation for End of Life (SCENZ) Group. She believes strongly in communicating her research to public audiences, using this epistemic privilege to advocate for those whose views are overlooked, and regularly appears in media as an expert on assisted dying. She has published widely on assisted dying including in Mortality and Social Science & Medicine. Jessica welcomes queries about dying and death studies in Aotearoa New Zealand and assisted dying research more generally.
Email: Jessica.young@vuw.ac.nzTwitter: @JessYoungTweets
Google Scholar: Up to date list of publications