Image information: ‘The Stone Bench in the Asylum at Saint-Remy, Vincent van Gogh, 1889’
CALL FOR PAPERS
Online workshop, Tuesday 27 October 2026 (ZOOM)
Workshop Convenors: Alana Harris (King’s College London) and Julie Rugg (University of York and Director of the Cemetery Research Group)
Call for Papers deadline – 19 June
This one-day, online workshop seeks to bring together scholars and community historians, policy makers and heritage activists who are committed to the reconceptualization of asylum burial grounds, memorialisation activism, and historical analysis of their afterlives.
We welcome academic papers and short communications around the following themes:
• the history of particular asylum burial grounds and memorialisation strategies;
• methodological innovations in life history, family history, and genealogical research developed through research on asylum thanatology;
• challenges to ‘authorised heritage discourses’ by consideration of asylum burial grounds, including broadened historical listing and inclusion narratives, with implications for local and national heritage policy and activism; and
• debates about the maintenance of disused cemeteries, and their reuse or development, following the Law Reform Commission’s ‘Burial and Cremation: Final Report’ (March 2026).
Proposals for 20-minute papers (consisting of a title, 300-word abstract and 50-word author biography) should be forwarded to [email protected] by 19 June 2026.
Accepted speakers will be notified by 3 July 2026.