A Four Week Class Taught Online Via Zoom

Saturdays, November 16, 23, 30 and December 7, 2024
2:00-3:30pm ET (NYC Time)
Admission: $100 Paid Patreon Members / $125 General Admission
* Book easily available for purchase online

PLEASE NOTE: Classes will be recorded and archived for students who cannot make that time

In our third book club on death and dying led by Dr. John Troyer of the Centre for Death and Society at the University of Bath (UK), we will read Lyn Lofland's groundbreaking and much overlooked text The Craft of Dying: The New Face of Death.Originally published in 1978 and re-issued by MIT Press in 2019, The Craft of Dying brings together many of the key ideas that death activist social movements created in the 1970s.

It is Dr Troyer's assertion that that this is the one book on death and dying everyone needs to read. It is so good, he proclaims, that after you finish it, you will tell other people interested in death and dying to also read it. Everything we think we know now about death today really got its start in the 1970s, and The Craft of Dying documents the original moment these ideas emerged—hospice care, death with dignity fights, natural death ethics, and most importantly, the Happy Death Movement.

Dr John Troyer is the Death Studies Scholar-at-Large and former director of the University of Bath’s Centre for Death and Society in the Department of Social and Policy Sciences at the University of Bath. John received his doctorate from the University of Minnesota in Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society. Within the field of death studies, John focuses on the history of science and technology, science and technology studies, bioethics and the law. His critically acclaimed book 'Technologies of the Human Corpse' was published in 2020 by MIT Press. You can still find hime on twitter at the Death Reference Desk and @DeathRef.