Hi, I’m George, and since I was introduced to Caitlin Doughty’s youtube channel “Ask a Mortician” as a middle schooler, I have been fascinated by all things macabre. She talks about the ways in which death informs all aspects of life, educating viewers on everything from how vampiric imagery is related to the history of embalming, the science of human composting, and Lenin’s corpse. As long as I can remember, I have been obsessed with all things arcane, all things that find strange connections between seemingly separate interests. I dug deeper, eventually learning about Morbid Anatomy, an organization that dedicates itself to “surveying the interstices of art and medicine, death and culture.” As a huge art and history nerd, and someone already immersed in macabre interests, I was thrilled. I became particularly fond of symbolism and motifs;  what images and language repeat across time and space and how they are similar or different across cultures. I was able to further explore this interest a few summers ago, when I took a Brown pre-college course on the apocalypse. We learned how cataclysm, fatalism, and moral binary are essential to the Christian Apocalypse, and how these tenets are echoed across time and used as a rhetorical device. The language of the apocalypse permeates our culture, it appears in presidential speeches, discussions of climate change, even daily conversation. The same can be said for ghostly imagery. When looking at texts on trauma, the word “haunting,” appears again and again, as illustrated in Laura Westengard’s Gothic Queer Culture. In addition, I have always been interested in teaching, and this interest has increased in the past year. 

All of this to say, for my project, I will construct a syllabus on cross-cultural depictions of death and mourning, focusing primarily on art, as well as poetry and gravestones or similar physical monuments. I will use the Morbid Anatomy library as a resource, and I will also reach out to their founder and librarian, respectively. I will do research on the construction of a syllabus, as well as speaking to teachers from LREI. My project will involve a lot of reading, so I will set up goals for how much I need to read and keep organized notes. As I read, I will conceptualize what units I would like to divide the hypothetical class into, and start to form ideas for classes and assignments. Once I have a clear understanding of how I want to divide the class, I will flesh out each section and come up with what readings would be assigned. In addition to the syllabus, I will generate a few detailed lesson plans, and recruit some seniors to come with me to the Green-wood Cemetery, where I will lead a class on gravestone iconography. For service, I will primarily volunteer with the Green-wood Cemetery. I may also volunteer with Lesbian Herstory Archives, Queering the Map, Food not Bombs, and Morbid Anatomy; they don’t have regular volunteer opportunities, so I need to have multiple service options. I’m very excited to begin working on this project!