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Emeritus classics professor at Colgate, Garland is joined in conversation by Carolyn Laferrière and Elizabeth Davis, to discuss his new book, "What to Expect When You're Dead." Registration requested.
ABOUT THE BOOK (FROM THE PUBLISHER):
A lively story of death, “What to Expect When You’re Dead” explores the fascinating death-related beliefs and practices of a wide range of ancient cultures and traditions—Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Hindu, Jewish, Zoroastrian, Etruscan, Greek, Roman, Early Christian, and Islamic. By drawing on the latest scholarship on ancient archaeology, art, literature, and funerary inscriptions, Robert Garland invites readers to put themselves in the sandals of ancient peoples and to imagine their mental state moment by moment as they sought—in ways that turn out to be remarkably similar to ours—to assist the dead on their journey to the next world and to understand life’s greatest mystery.
“What to Expect When You’re Dead” chronicles the ways ancient peoples answered questions such as: How to achieve a good death and afterlife? What’s the best way to dispose of a body? Do the dead face a postmortem judgement—and where do they end up? Do the dead have bodies in the afterlife—and can they eat, drink, and have sex? And what can the living do to stay on good terms with the nonliving?
Filled with intriguing stories and frequent humor, “What to Expect When You’re Dead” will be a morbidly delicious treat for every reader alive.
IN CONVERSATON
Robert Garland is the Roy D. and Margaret B. Wooster Professor Emeritus of the Classics at Colgate University. He is the author of many books, including "The Greek Way of Death," "Wandering Greeks" (Princeton), and "Athens Burning." He has also recorded six courses for the Great Courses, most recently "God against the Gods." Garland has been a Fulbright Scholar, a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study and recipient of the George Grote Ancient History Prize.
Elizabeth Davis is professor of anthropology at Princeton University. Her first book, "Bad Souls: Madness and Responsibility in Modern Greece" (Duke University Press, 2012), is an ethnographic study of responsibility among psychiatric patients and their caregivers in the borderlands between Greece and Turkey. She has also written two books based on ethnographic and archival research in Cyprus. The first, "Artifactual: Forensic and Documentary Knowing" (Duke University Press, 2023), addresses public secrecy and knowledge projects about the violence of the 1960s-70s that led to the enduring division of Cyprus, including forensic investigations, visual archives, and documentary film. The second, "The Time of the Cannibals: On Conspiracy Theory and Context" (Fordham University Press, 2024), takes Cyprus as a context for rethinking conspiracy theory and political theology.
Carolyn M. Laferrière is associate curator of ancient mediterranean art at the Princeton University Art Museum. She is the author of "Divine Music in Archaic and Classical Greek Art: Seeing the Songs of the Gods," published in 2024 with Cambridge University Press. Before coming to the Art Museum, she was a postdoctoral scholar and teaching fellow at the Center for the Premodern World and the Department of Classics at the University of Southern California (2020–22). Previously, she was a postdoctoral associate with Archaia, Yale University’s program for the interdisciplinary study of the ancient world, and a lecturer in the Departments of the History of Art and Classics. In 2018–19, she curated "Sights and Sounds of Ancient Ritual" at the Yale University Art Gallery.
Presented with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this programming do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
AGE GROUP: | Adults |
EVENT TYPE: | Lectures & Panels | Humanities | Author Talks | *Registration Requested |
TAGS: | NEH |
