Books

(listed alphabetically and not order of importance) includes textbooks, thesis/dissertation, graphic-novels, poetry books, stage plays

• Aberration of the Mind: Suicide and Suffering in the Civil War Era by Diane Sommerville

• “Angels in America” by Tony Kushner (stage play)

• African American Entrepreneurship in Richmond, 1890-1940: The Funeral Industry and the Story of R.C. Scott by Michael Plater

• Beloved by Toni Morrison

• Black Female Vampires in African American Women’s Novels, 1977-2011: She Bites Back by Kendra Parker

• Cemeteries & Gravemarkers: Voices of American Culture by Richard Meyer (editor)

• Chinese American Death Rituals: Respecting the Ancestors by Sue Chung and Priscilla Wegars

• Death and the American South by Craig Thompson and Lorri Glover (editors)

• Death Becomes Her: Cultural Narratives of Femininity and Death in Nineteenth Century America by Sheri Weinstein and Elizabeth Dill

• Death in Black and White: Death Ritual and Family Ecology by Charlton McIlwain

• Death and Dying in New Mexico by Martina Will de Chaparro

• Death and Dying: Views from Many Cultures by Richard Kalish (editor)

• Death and the Idea of Mexico by Claudio Lomnitz

• Death in the New World: Cross-Cultural Encounters, 1492-1800 by Erik Seeman

• Digging for the Disappeared: Forensic Science After Atrocity by Adam Rosenblatt

• Dying to Eat: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Food, Death, and the Afterlife by Candi Cann

• Ethnicity and the American Cemetery by Richard Meyer (editor)

• “Falling Seeds Take Root: Ritualizing Chinese American Identity Through Funerals” by Juwen Zhang (dissertation)

• Gore Capitalism by Valencia Sayak

• Harlem Book of the Dead by James Van Der Zee

• Hidden History: African American Cemeteries in Central Virginia by Lynn Rainville

• Hiroshima by John Hersey

• In the Wake: On Blackness and Being by Christina Sharpe

• Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction and the Meaning of Liberty by Dorothy Roberts

• Lay Down Body: Living History in African American Cemeteries by Roberta Hughes Wright and Wilbur B. Hughes III

• LGBTQ-Inclusive Hospice and Palliative Care: A Practical Guide to Transforming Professional Practice by Kimberly Acquaviva

• Love Cemetery: Unburying the Secret History of Slaves by China Galland

• Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward

• Mortal Dilemmas: The Troubled Landscape of Death in America by Donald Joralemon

• Mortality, Immortality, and Other Life Strategies by Zygmundt Bauman

• My Father’s Wake: How the Irish Teach Us to Live, Love, and Die by Kevin Toolis

• “Negotiations of Individual and Community Identity: A Study of Chinese-Canadian Mortuary Material Culture in Vancouver and Victoria, 1900-1960” by Ani Chenier (thesis)

• “Nine Night” by Natasha Gordon (stage play)

• “Myths Laid to Rest: Death, Burial, and Memory in the American South” by Kristen Burton (dissertation)

• Nine Years Under: Coming of Age in an Inner-City Funeral Home by Sheri Booker

• Passed On: African American Mourning Stories, a Memorial by Karla Holloway

• Pioneer Cemeteries: Sculpture Gardens of the Old West by Annette Stott

• Queer Necropolitics by Jin Haritaworn and Adi Kuntsman (co-editors)

• Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America by Ann Braude

• Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag

• Revolutions in Sorrow: The American Experience of Death in Global Perspective by Peter Stearns

• “ ‘Sealing the Bond’: A Qualitative Study of African American Funeral Rituals” by Danielle (Grant) Graham (dissertation)

• Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward

• Talking to the Dead: Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism by Barbara Weisberg

• Talking to the Dead: Religion, Music, and Lived Memory Among Gullah/Geechee Women by LeRhonda Manigault-Bryan

• Taryn Simon: An Occupation of Loss by Taryn Simon

• The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story by Edwidge Danticat

• The Bone Woman: A Forensic Anthropologist’s Search for Truth in the Mass Graves of Rwanda, Bosina, Croatia and Kosovo by Clea Koff

• The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine by Lindsey Fitzharris

• The Cancer Journals by Audre Lord

• The Death Care Industry: African American Cemeteries and Funeral Homes by Roberta Hughes Wright and Wilbur Hughes III

• The Family, Women and Death: Comparative Studies by S.C. Humphreys

• The Famished Road by Ben Okri

• The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

• The Impossibility of Religious Freedom by Winnifred Fallers Sullivan

• The Politics of Mourning: Death and Horror in Arlington National Cemetery by Micki McElya

• The Power to Die: Slavery and Suicide in British North America by Terri Snyder

• The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation by Daina Ramey Berry

• The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery by Vincent Brown

• To Serve the Living: Funeral Directors and the African American Way of Death by Suzanne Smith

• We Regret to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda by Philip Gourevitch

• “What Lies Beneath: Reading the Cultural Landscape of Graveyard and Burial Grounds in African-American History and Literature” by Deborah Lafayette Henderson (dissertation)

• Where the Line Bleeds by Jesmyn Ward

• Women and the Material Culture of Death by Maureen Daly Groggin and Beth Fowkes Tobin (editors)

• Women’s Ritual in Formative Oaxaca: Figure-Making, Divination, Death and the Ancestors by Joyce Marcus

Essays / Chapters / Blogs

(listed alphabetically and not in order of importance)

• “Black AfterLives Matter: Cultivating Kinfulness as Reproductive Justice” by Ruha Benjamin (within Making Kin Not Population edited by Adele Clarke and Donna Haraway)

• Black Female Undertakers in 20th-Century Baltimore by Kami Fletcher

• Black Women and the Peoples Temple in Jonestown by Sikivu Hutchinson

• Death and the Afterlife in African Culture by Kwasi Wiredu (within Person and Community: Ghanaian Philosophical Studies I edited by Kwasi Wiredu and Kwame Gyekye)

• Feminist Death Work: A History by Kami Fletcher

• Funeral Divas: How Women are Returning to the Death Care Industry in Droves by Vinnie Rotondaro

• Grave Diggers & Body Washers – Great Women in Death History by Sarah Chavez

• Holy Spirits: The Power and Legacy of America’s Female Spiritualists by Dianca London Potts

• “James C. Thomas, Undertaker and Business Man” (chapter 11) in The Negro in Business by Booker T. Washington

• Motherhood on the Battlefield of Death by Sarah Chavez

• Not Just the Funeral: Queen Sugar Puts the African American Burial Tradition on Full Display by Kami Fletcher

• “Objects of Immortality: Hairwork and Mourning in Victorian Visual Culture” by Rachel Harmeyer (conference essay)

• “On the Wrong Side of the Fence: Racial Segregation in American Cemeteries” by Angelika Krüger-Kahloula (within History and Memory in African-American Culture edited by Geneviève Fabre and Robert O’Meally)

• Race & the Funeral Profession: What Jessica Mitford Missed by Kami Fletcher

• The Aztec Women Who Became Goddesses After Dying During Childbirth by Alejandro López

• The Disappearance of a Distinctly Black Way to Mourn Tiffany Stanley

• “The Negro Undertaker” (chapter 10) in The Negro in Business by Booker T. Washington

• “Life’s Quiet Companion” by Greg Lehman (within The Penguin Book of Death edited by Gabrielle Carey and Rosemary Sorenson)

Journal Articles

(listed alphabetically and not in order of importance)

• “African Americans in Bereavement: Grief as a Function of Ethnicity” by Anne Laurie and Robert Neimeyer (Omega, 2008)

• “Afro-American Gravemarkers in North Carolina” by M. Ruth Little (Markers, 1989)

• “Agents and Objects of Death: Gay Murder, Boyfriend Twins, and Queer of Color Negativity” by Bobby Benedicto (A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 2019)

• “An American Death in Bangkok: The Murder of Darrell Berrigan and the Hybrid Origins of Gay Identity in 1960s Thailand” (A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 1999)

• “And Die in Dixie: Funerals, Death & Heaven in the Slave Community 1700-1865” by David Roediger (The Massachusetts Review, 1981)

• “Chinese Graves and Gravemarkers in Hong Kong” by Chun-shing Chow and Elizabeth Kenworthy Teather (Markers, 1998)

• “Composantos: Sacred Places of the Southwest” by Laura Sanborn (Markers, 1989)

• “Exhuming Women’s Premarket Duties in the Care of the Dead” by Georganne Rundblad (Gender and Society, 1995)

• Extermination of the Joyas: Gendercide in Spanish California by Deborah Miranda (A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 2010)

• “ ‘I Never Regretted Coming to Africa’: The Story of Harriet Ruggles Loomis’ Gravestone” by Laurel Gabel (Markers, 1999)

• “Imagining Queer Life After Death” (A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 2018)

• “ ‘Ours is a Business of Loyalty’: African American Funeral Home Owners in Southern Cities” by Beverly Bunch-Lyons (The Southern Quarterly, 2015)

• “Paying Your Respects: Transgender Women and Detransitioning After Death” by Karol Kovalovich Weaver (Death Studies, 2018)

• “Queer Widowhood” by Nina Lykke (Lambda Nordica, 2015)

• “Real Business: Maryland’s First Black Cemetery Journey’s Into the Enterprise of Death, 1870-1920” by Kami Fletcher (Thanatological Studies, 2014)

• “Separated by Death and Color: The African American Cemetery of New Philadelphia, Illinois” by Charlotte King (Historical Archaeology, 2010)

• Taking Care of Business: Canadian Community Mausoleums and the Commercialization of Death, 1912-1936” by Dorothy Smith (Markers, 2015)

• “The Changing Perceptions of Death and Burial: A Look at the Nigerian Obituaries” by Stella Ogbuagu (Anthropologica, 1989)

• “The Living Dead: Art and Immortality Among the Yoruba of Nigeria” (Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, 1977)

• “The Plantation Community Cemetery: Reading Black and White Relationships in the Landscape” by Stacey Graham (Markers, 2015)

• “Transgender and Gender Non-conforming Bereavement (TGNC): A Case Study on Complicated Grief Experienced and the Effect of Partner Suicide on Interpersonal Relationships and Subsequent Partnerships of the Bereaved” (Death Studies, 2019) by Rachael Nolan

• “Tributes in Stone and Lapidary Lapses: Commemorating Black People in Eighteenth-and Nineteenth-Century America” by Angelika Krüger-Kahloula (Markers, 1989)

• “Women’s Deathbeath Pulpits: From Quiet Congregants to Iconic Ministers” by Lisa Shaver (Rhetoric Review, 1995)

• “Up From the Grave: A Sociological Reconstruction of an African American Community from Cemetery Data in the Rural Midwest” by Gary Foster and Craig Eckert (Journal of Black Studies, 2003)

Videos

(listed alphabetically and not in order of importance)

• Angels in America (2003)

• Dayveon (2017)

• Departures (2008)

• Extremis (2016)

• End Game (2018)

• Fruitvale Station (2013)

• Homegoings (2013)

• Miss Evers Boys (1997)

• Resting Place (1986)

• Say Her Name: The Life and Death of Sandra Bland (2018)

• The Green Mile (1999)

• The Hate You Give (2018)

• The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2017)

• The Naked Truth: Death by Delivery (2017)

• Time: The Kalief Browder Story (2017)

• Truth and Lies: Jonestown – Paradise Lost (2018)

Websites / Databases

(listed alphabetically and not in order of importance)

• 100 Black Women of Funeral Service

• African American Funeral Programs from the Augusta-Richmond County Public Library-System

• Colonial Frontier Massacres in Central and Eastern Australia 1788-1930

• Death & the Maiden

• Horror Noire Syllabus

• NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project

• Queer Death Studies Network

• Women in Funeral Service

News / Magazine Articles

(listed alphabetically and not in order of importance)

• African American Burial Ground Network Act Introduced in Congress by Preservation Maryland (www.preservationmaryland.org, February 28, 2019)

• Bennie Smith: Delmarva Black Businessman of the Year & CEO of Bennie Smith Funeral Homes (Delmarva African American Pride Magazine, Fall 2011).

• Burning the Devil in Guatemala by Kate Newman (National Geographic, December 4, 2012)

• Dance of Life to Honor Death by Joan Chatfield-Taylor (New York Times, February 22, 2004)

• For the Forgotten African-American Dead: Neglected Black Cemeteries Deserve the Same Level of Care that Their Confederate Counterparts Get by Brian Palmer (New York Times, January 7, 2017)

• The First Decoration Day by David Blight Newark Star Ledger (April 27, 2015)

• The Long Goodbye: Why Funerals are Big Deals in Ghana by Paula Newton, CNN (March 11, 2014)

• The Mapping of Massacres by Ceridwen Dovey (The New Yorker, December 6, 2017)