DEATH AND THE HUMANITIES

Area coordinator: Eleanor Kerfoot, eleanor.kerfoot@balliol.ox.ac.uk

Medical science provides us with frameworks for explaining, defining, and managing death. Humanities research enables us to understand how these frameworks have developed, why and when they are contested, how they might function in practice, and what questions they leave aside. 

This Medical Humanities stream draws together Oxford scholars working on death and mortality from humanities perspectives. Its primary aim is to foster interdisciplinary exchange in research on death, not only within the humanities but also between the humanities and medical sciences. In doing so, the stream addresses pressing questions surrounding medicine’s role in shaping, and giving meaning to, the end of life.