Seven postgraduate students from the United Kingdom’s University of Winchester will see their work published alongside established academics in a new book about human interactions with death. Religion, Death and the Senses, co-edited by Christina Welch, Ph.D., reader in religious studies and death studies, features chapters written or co-written by students from the university’s Death, Religion and Culture program (DRC).

Many of the students in the DRC master’s course bring their own practical expertise to the subject because they work directly with the dead, including funeral directors, embalmers, mortuary staff, bereavement counselors and palliative care nurses. According to Welch: “There is a need to include the voices of these students who are connected to death in their professional practice and who are rarely heard in the academic world.”

Book chapters include “The Sense of Smell and the Odour of Death” by Wendy Birch, who manages the anatomy lab at University College London. Birch examines the way humans react to the scent of volatile organic compounds given off by bodies after death.

In addition to smell, the book explores our four other physical senses, along with a sixth sense, movement, as well as three cultural senses – humor, decency and loss.

Co-author with Welch, funeral director Lucy Jacklin penned a chapter in which she uses her professional experience to explore our sense of decency relative to the display of human remains – specifically the “plastinated” body parts displayed at Body Worlds exhibitions. Another chapter in the book, “Body Disposal, Decency and Dark Tourism,” explores this topic as well.

Other University of Winchester academics who contributed to the book include Laura Hubner, professor of film and media, who looks at death and humor; Olu Taiwo, senior lecturer in performing arts, who describes how the Yoruba people of West Africa perform masquerades to remember their ancestors; and Heidi Dawson-Hobbis, senior lecturer in biological anthropology, who explores the part played by the human sense of touch in the examination of skeletal remains.

Religion, Death and the Senses, co-edited by Welch and Jasmine Hazel Shadrack of Western University in Canada, is published by Equinox and priced at £24.95 (~US$33). Available on Amazon. winchester.ac.uk