The Johns Hopkins University Death x Data Lab, part of the Black Beyond Data project and LifexCode initiative, is glad to announce a call for papers for an upcoming symposium about human remains in university collections. The two-day symposium will take place in person and virtually in spring 2024.

Higher-ed institutions can house many types of human remains, from bits of tissue on medical school histology slides to mummified bodies exhibited in campus museums. As schools continue to confront the legacies of medical racism, coercion, and colonialism that fueled many collections, historians, conservators, curators, art historians, anthropologists, archeologists, and others are reevaluating stewardship of human remains.

In this small-group symposium, we hope to workshop article-length works-in-progress and help each other think through the possibilities and implications of this reckoning in America and beyond.

We welcome papers that investigate the acquisition, possession, description, presentation, storage, disposal, or return of human remains in academic institutions. What does the use and abuse of human remains reveal about wider structural, historical, and political processes? How did faculty and staff in higher education procure human remains, and which populations did they target in these practices? How did communities safeguard against coerced agreement or outright disinterment or robbery of their loved ones and ancestors? What kinds of institutional, national, or state, or institution-level regulations could address these historical practices and prevent them from being repeated? How do communities care for and re-sanctify human remains upon repatriation? What might repatriation frameworks look like beyond NAGRPA?  

Topics might include, but are certainly not limited to: 

- Revisiting narratives about “donation” 

- Problems of provenance

- Foregrounding community-member biographies 

- Reinterpreting museum collections 

- The work of repatriation, including descendent-community-led work

- Historical trauma for impacted communities

- Adjudicating access

We conceive of this topic broadly and look forward to hearing from graduate students and early-career scholars in anthropology, archaeology, art history, bioethics, biology, history, library science, medicine, sociology, and more. We also welcome public history, digital humanities projects, multimedia work, and personal narratives. 

To maximize accessibility, all papers must be precirculated.

Instructions:  Please submit the proposal electronically using the form below by September 1, 2023. Contact: Questions? Email Jessica Hester at jhester6@jhmi.edu.