Registration is £25 (£15 for students).

This provocative and challenging two day conference looks at the moral, ontological and infrastructural problems presented during times of epidemic infection.

This highly interdisciplinary conference will include papers from a public health perspective as well as from the medical humanities, anthropology, geography, sociology, history

Discussions and papers at the conference will examine the meanings of the treatment of human corpses during plague outbreaks throughout history, from the ‘Plague of Athens’ and the Middle Ages, to fin de siécle Hong Kong and the recent Ebola outbreak in West Africa.

Themes of the conference include:

• visual representations of corpses and burials during epidemics or as vectors of infection
• burials as sites of social conflict and resistance during epidemics
• autopsy in the context of epidemics
• medical problematisations of urban burial grounds as sources of infection
• technologies, practices, and the labour of burials in relation to infection and epidemics
• body hiding and body dumping in the course of epidemics
• burial sites as both locations of cultural heritage and biological/aDNA archives

Convened by

Dr Christos Lynteris, University of Cambridge

Dr Nicholas Evans, University of Cambridge