Steering Group:

Professor Ruth Penfold-Mounce is based in the Sociology Department at the University of York and works in the arena of cultural and visual criminology and death studies. Ruth launched the York Death and Culture Walk as a pedagogic tool back in 2019. She completed her second monograph Death, the Dead and Popular Culture (Emerald) in 2018 and has published articles in the arena of death and culture including ‘Consuming Criminal Corpses’ and ‘Corpses, Popular Culture and Forensic Science’. Ruth also writes for Discover Society and The Conversation. She has worked with BBC Radio 4, BBC2 and as a consultant for BBC1.

Dr Julie Rugg is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of York, and since the 1980s has been working in the field of cemetery history and policy. She has published extensively on British funerary culture. Her most recent monograph is Churchyard and Cemetery: Tradition and Modernity in Rural North Yorkshire She has international links with death scholars throughout Europe and hosts the annual International Cemeteries Colloquium in York.

Professor Benjamin Poore is based in the School of Arts and Creative Technologies at the University of York. As a researcher, he has written on the adaptation of texts between page, stage and screen, and on the cultural afterlives of Victorian fictional characters, authors, and other historical figures. His books include Heritage, Nostalgia and Modern British Theatre: Staging the Victorians and Theatre & Empire.  

Dr Daniel Robins is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Sociology, University of York. His research examines the relationship between science, technology, and the dead body. He received the AsSIST-UK Andrew Webster PhD Prize (2022) for the contribution of his PhD research to policy and social theory in the environmental and technological management of the dead body. His work can be found in the Mortality and Sociological Review journals, as well as the edited collection, Ghost Criminology.

Dr Bethan Michael-Fox works at the Open University, UK. She is the managing editor of Mortality and co-host of The Death Studies Podcast. She facilitates the death and culture network's researcher meet up group to support those researching in this area, run in collaboration with the Association for the Study of Death and Society (ASDS). Find the dates for this group..

Dr Ciara Henderson is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the School of Nursing & Midwifery, Trinity College Dublin.  Specialising in the sociohistorical dimensions of death, bereavement, and mourning, her work explores sociocultural responses to reproductive and infant loss, with specific expertise in indigenous death traditions and the use of  folk burial grounds for infants, known in Ireland as cillíní.