CfP: Showing Death in the Nineteenth Century - National Academy of Medicine, Paris - 26 March 2026

As Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, ‘to be dead is to be a prey for the living’ (1956, 593). The vulnerability of the dead, described by the French philosopher, applies to their memories as well as their bodies. Death is, indeed, not merely absence but requires us to face the materiality of the corpse. This one-day international conference intends to show that studying the nineteenth-century relationship to death, as an omnipresent – destructive, but familiar – reality, can inform our own contemporary attitudes and reveal how nineteenth-century representations still shape our own death culture.

 

The nineteenth-century Western world witnessed a shifting interest in the materiality of death and in the relationship between the living and the dead. The creation of cemeteries introduced a new ‘necrogeography’ (Laqueur 2015) and funeral trappings in turn reflected the social status of the departed. Death was further embodied in material objects, some of which were worn for the world to see in the mourning fashions of the living, who cultivated ‘secular relics’ (Lutz 2015). These consisted in the incorruptible bodily materials or the belongings of the dead, and allowed the living to remember the individuality of the deceased via a relationship of synecdoche. Yet, while visual art forms and material objects may recall the materiality of death, literary texts can arguably generate more complex representations, evoking both visible signs and the absence, the silence and the invisibility that result from death (Zigarovich 2012). Whether literary or visual, now as in the nineteenth century, representations of death have drawn from a ‘common cultural image repertoire’ (Bronfen 1992, xi), shaped by moral, religious, social and aesthetic boundaries, and based on a system of polarities – exposure and concealment, decay and purity, both corporeal and spiritual. The aim of this one-day interdisciplinary conference is to bring together researchers from various backgrounds to rethink these representations of death. Although research has often focused on what made death ‘good’ or ‘bad’ (Jalland 1996) according to moral standards, this conference will focus on the materiality of death and the corpse. It aims to address some of the following questions so as to renew our understanding of nineteenth-century Western representations of death: 

  • Who produced these material representations of death? On what scale? Were there specific local attitudes to death? What influenced them (geography / topography / religion / traditions / gender)?
  • Through what medium? How were new technologies like photography (Linkman 2006; Ruby 1995) and embalming (Carol 2015) used on the dead body to restore it, dissect it (Hurren 2011), or preserve its likeness (Ebenstein 2017)? How did matter determine representation?
  • Who displayed dead bodies and why? Were certain depictions of the corpse acceptable in one medium but not in another and, if so, why? To what extent could sensory experiences of the corpse be acceptable, and under what conditions? And, ultimately, how could the corpse itself and its fragments be used in artistic or didactic endeavours?

We invite proposals for 20-minute papers from scholars in literature, death studies, history, and art history, and from curators, artists and deathcare professionals. Possible topics may include (but are not limited to):

 

The process of dying:

  • Uncertain death:  suspended animation, taphophobia and premature burial
  • Sensory experiences of the dead body: viewing, holding wakes, touching, kissing the dead
  • The smells and sounds of death 

Staging death and exhibiting the corpse:

  • Death and dying on stage, in literature and the visual arts
  • Sanitising bodies and public spaces
  • Death behind closed doors: during childbirth, domestic murder, violent and painful death
  • The corpse as spectacle: museums, medical training, public executions, and popular entertainment 

Mourning and memorialising the dead:

  • Preserving the corpse: relics, embalming, funeral trappings (coffins, funeral textiles and brasses)
  • Preserving the image of the dead: photography, painting, masks, funereal art
  • The architecture of death: tombs, cenotaphs, mausoleums
  • The marginal dead: paupers, prostitutes, criminals, and suicides 

The one-day conference is organised by the Alexandre-Koyré Centre (UMR 8560) in collaboration with the Library of the National Academy of Medicine. It will be held (in person) on 26 March 2026 at the National Academy of Medicine (16, rue Bonaparte, 75006 Paris).

 

Please submit abstracts of 250 words in English or French along with a short bio-note (100 words) as a single Word document to showingdeath2026@gmail.com before 5 October 2025. Paper proposals should include your full name, institutional affiliation and email address.

 

Select Bibliography

  • Ariès, Philippe. 1977. L’homme devant la mort. Paris : Editions du Seuil.   
  • Ariès, Philippe. 1982. Images de l’homme devant la mort. Paris : Editions du Seuil.
  • Bronfen, Elisabeth. 1992. Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
  • Carol, Anne. 2015. L'embaumement, une passion romantique : France, XIXe siècle. Ceyzérieu : Champ Vallon.
  • Carol, Anne et Isabelle Renaudet (eds). 2013. La mort à l'œuvre : Usages et représentations du cadavre dans l'art. Aix-en-Provence : Presses universitaires de Provence.
  • Ebenstein, Joanna. 2017. Death: A Graveside Companion. London: Thames & Hudson Ltd.
  • Hotz, Mary Elizabeth. 2009. Literary Remains, Representations of Death and Burial in Victorian England. New York: New York University Press.
  •  Hurren, Elizabeth T. 2012. Dying for Victorian Medicine: English Anatomy and Its Trade in the Dead Poor, c.1834–1929. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK.
  • Jalland, Patricia. 1996. Death in the Victorian Family. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Laqueur, Thomas. 2015. The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
  • Linkman, Audrey. 2006. ‘Taken from life: Post-mortem portraiture in Britain 1860–1910’. History of Photography, 30 (4): 309–347.
  • Llewellyn, Nigel. 1997. The Art of Death: Visual Culture in the English Death Ritual c.1500–c.1800. London: Reaktion Books.
  • Lutz, Deborah. 2015. Relics of Death in Victorian Literature and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Ruby, Jay. 1999. Secure the Shadow Death and Photography in America. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.
  • Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1956.  Being and Nothingness. Trans. Hazel Barnes. New York: Philosophical Library.
  • Vovelle, Michel. 1983. La Mort et l’Occident de 1300 à nos jours. Paris : Gallimard.
  • Zigarovich, Jolene. 2012. Writing Death and Absence in the Victorian Novel: Engraved Narratives. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.


Organising Committee

Laurence Talairach, UT2J / Centre Alexandre-Koyré

Clémentine Guiol, Centre Alexandre-Koyré

Noémie Robert, Centre Alexandre-Koyré

Jérôme van Wijland, Bibliothèque de l’Académie nationale de Médecine