Communist Encounters with the Dead

My 2017 conference talk at Manchester University.

All the way back in 2017, when the world was young and the future seemed bright, I was invited to speak at a conference about corpses. Hosted at Manchester University, it was an interesting crowd – with papers on topics ranging from prison museum tourism, to taxidermy, to famous historical corpses, to intangible heritage and folk traditions.

For my own talk, I discussed death symbolism, and the frequent presence of real human remains, in Communist-era memorial sites in Southeast Europe.

I always planned to develop that talk into a full written paper for publication. Due to the chaos of recent years, I have only recently got as far as writing out a first draft – and I still need to go back through and add lots of references. But I thought you may find this interesting! So I’m sharing it below, illustrated with my Powerpoint slides from the conference.

Feeling distinctly out of my element, talking about monuments in a university – rather than while stood in front of the monuments themselves.