As part of the Nelson Lectures on Southeast Asia, the East Asia Center will be welcoming cultural anthropologist and mortician Ruth E. Toulson, for her talk entitled "The Gift of a Corpse: Notes from a Singaporean Chinese Funeral Parlor."
Drawing on her work as an anthropologist and embalmer, Dr. Toulson will take us behind the scenes in a Singaporean Chinese funeral parlor, to examine the charged social relations only possible around a corpse. Toulson received her PhD from the University of Cambridge and teaches in the Division of Liberal Arts, Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, Maryland, where she is also Assistant Dean for Research. She is the author of Necropolitics of the Ordinary: Death and Grieving in Contemporary Singapore (University of Washington Press), co-editor of the forthcoming The Cambridge Handbook of the Anthropology of Death and editor, with Zahra Newby, of The Materiality of Mourning: Cross Disciplinary Perspectives, as well as the author of multiple articles and book chapters on death, grieving, and material culture, which draw on her research in the funeral industry in Southeast Asia and Mainland China.
Join us for the event on Tuesday, December 2, from 4:00 - 5:30 p.m. in Gibson 341.