Scholars Collective on Mortality

The Scholars Collective on Mortality is a multidisciplinary pilot program of the DCHA. Members of the collective have their academic homes in the fields of history, health care, psychology, architecture, museum studies, musicology, classics, and others. All have interests in human life and death, especially as related to environmental concerns, issues in medicine and health-care policy, caregiving, the arts, the provision of services related to mental health, and the ethics and politics surrounding human remains in many contexts, among other topics.

It is our conviction that the human experience cannot be understood without consideration of the multifaceted ways in which human beings approach, understand, and experience mortality—as an existential and a material fact. This may be truer now than at any other time in human history, as we face a future in which we may speak of the deaths not only of individuals or even whole communities, but species-level extinction due to cascading environmental damage and decline. That makes understanding human life in its completeness—meaning throughout all the life cycle—an especially urgent topic now.

The Scholars Collective on Mortality hopes to invite reflection on and to encourage research into the many facets of mortality from various disciplinary perspectives. It is our hope that this work will in some way lessen our collective human alienation from the reality of our finitude—which is to say our alienation, indeed, from life itself.

The Mortality Collective is organized by UT History faculty member Monica Black, Distinguished Professor in the Humanities.