LOS ANGELES SYMPOSIUM LINE-UP

Saturday, September 7, 2024 · 12 pm- 6 pm
Philosophical Research Society
(3910 Los Feliz Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90027)

12:00 · Introductory Remarks

12:30 · Memento Mori: The Art of Contemplating Death to Live A Better Life
Joanna Ebenstein, Morbid Anatomy Founder and Creative Director

This talk will introduce the speaker’s new book Memento Mori: The Art of Contemplating Death to Live a Better Life, and introduce its core concepts.

1:00 · Where There is Death, There is Life
Sarah Chavez, Executive director of the Order of the Good Death

Pulitzer Prize winning author Ernest Becker argued that our fear of death is so great that it drives our actions, beliefs, and choices—often with negative consequences. So, how can we come to terms with this fear and live a life that does not hide or deny death and grief, but helps us to cultivate a healthy relationship with our inevitable mortality? Mexico may have the answer.

1:30 · The Watseka Wonder
Asti Hustvedt, Independent Scholar and Author of Medical Muses

In 1877, the small town of Watseka, Illinois was thrust into the limelight when a thirteen-year-old girl fell into a cataleptic trance and became possessed by the spirit of a teenager who had died in an insane asylum twelve years earlier. The extraordinary event, billed as the first documented case of possession in America, became known as the “Watseka Wonder.” Doctors, clergy, journalists, philosophers and the Society for Psychical Research all investigated, and while they agreed on the facts, issues of epistemic authority over the case were highly contested. The Watseka Wonder continues to fascinate because it questions the very nature of consciousness and erases the lines that separate the living from the dead. 

2:00 · Memento Oblivisci (Remember You Shall Forget): Zombie Ideas, Trimalchio’s Feast, and Strange Loop of Surviving Your Own Death
Richard Faulk, translator of Frederik Ruysch and His Thesaurus Anatomicus: A Morbid Guide

Implicit in memento mori, the injunction to remember that we all must die, is an acknowledgment that we also must forget. Just as bodies that hold on beyond their natural span become undead monsters, zombie ideas curdle into platitudes that imperil the possibility of genuine insight.

In the figure of Trimalchio, Petronius’ Satyricon lampoons a spectrum of Roman platitudes, including the Stoic acceptance of death. A reading of the novel’s famous banquet scene vividly shows how a fixation on mortality can itself become a denial of death.

2:30 · Remember You Must Die. Might as Well Talk About It
Jillian A. Tullis PhD, Professor in the Department of Communication

Whether you embrace Becker's Denial of Death, it's offspring Terror Management Theory, or even Ariès' historical evolution of attitudes about death, the West has grappled with how to have meaningful conversations about dying, death, and grief. This talk will focus on how to have effective conversations about a challenging topic with family members or the family physician.

3:00 · Stage 4 Cancer and My Night Sea Journey to Wellness
Independent Scholar of Religions Amy Slonaker, JD, PhD

In 2017 I was diagnosed with Stage 4 metastatic breast to bone cancer and told I had two years to live. In this talk I will discuss my journey to wellness and how I used a devastating diagnosis and the threat of imminent death as a catalyst to recalibrate my life into alignment with my values and interests. In this talk I will engage key concepts discussed in Memento Mori such as C.G. Jung’s “night sea journey;” an archetypal concept Jung uses to describe a painful but necessary stage of spiritual transformation.

3:30 · “A Smile that Makes Forever:” A Memento Mori of Teeth
Devon Deimler, PhD, Pacifica Graduate Institute

With each gnash, smile, or showing of teeth, the human skeleton peeks through. Via art, myth, and dreams, this illustrated talk plays with the poetics and phenomenology of teeth to entertain toothsome smiles as biting, ready-made memento mori and flashes of n/evermore in the everyday.

4:00 · Musings on Dead Birds
Morbid Anatomy Mythologist in Residence Liz Andres

Vibrant in life, poignant in death, imagery of dead birds has long been popular in western art. Associated with the soul, and beautiful in their own right, encountering dead birds may evoke a range of emotional responses. This richly-illustrated talk will explore dead birds in Dutch still life paintings, Victorian Christmas cards, and modern taxidermy art, and invite listeners to reflect on these delicate embodiments of spirit.

4:30 · Death in the Permafrost: Arctic Mementos Mori in the Age of Climate Change 
Colin Dickey, author of Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places and co-editor of The Morbid Anatomy Anthology

On the sparsely populated Arctic Archipelago of Svalbard, the permafrost makes it too difficult to bury bodies, so graves are few and far between: a small graveyard in the main settlement of Longyearbyen, a lonely whaler's graveyard called Gravnesset ("Grave Point"), and a few single trappers' graves spread out through the island. Protected by the government, these graves are nonetheless in constant motion: the thawing and the refreezing of the permafrost is slowly bringing these bodies to the surface once more. Colin Dickey will share stories of his trips to Svalbard and the graves he found there, and discuss how we treat those unchanging reminders of mortality in a world where the ground is always shifting.

5:00 · Persephone's Beauty Cream
Maryam Sayyad, PhD, Mythological Studies Scholar

In the Classical world, a profound relationship between death and love was recognized and mythologized through stories featuring Persephone and Aphrodite. These mighty goddesses of death and love face off as rivals in the myth of Adonis, then collude and collaborate in the initiation saga of "Eros and Psyche." Here, Persephone gifts Aphrodite with a mysterious substance that enhances her already potent allure—a strange aphrodisiac that embodies Persephone’s unique brand of beauty. This talk delves into the nature of Persephone's beauty, exploring it as a metaphor for the beauty conferred by death.

5:00 · Book Signings

SPEAKER BIOS

Liz Andres is a museum professional and scholar based in Los Angeles. She holds degrees in Art History, Classical Archaeology, and Museum Studies from U.C. Berkeley and the University of Leicester, and currently oversees gallery education at the J. Paul Getty Museum. She is pursuing her PhD in Mythological Studies at Pacifica Graduate Institute, and is a resident mythologist and frequent presenter with Morbid Anatomy, as well as a regular Death Café host. Her current research interests include hybrid and liminal creatures in ancient Greek art and mythology, museum taxidermy, and representations of death, myth, and nature in western art.

Sarah Chavez is a former historian and museum curator whose current work as the Executive Director of The Order of the Good Death, Co-Founder of the Collective For Radical Death Studies, and a founder of the Death Positive Movement, focuses on ways to help people live and die better. She is the author of We Need to Talk About Death, which was selected as a best new children’s picture book by The Guardian.

Devon Deimler, PhD is a writer, artist, and mythologist. She is Associate Core Faculty of Mythological Studies with an Emphasis in Depth Psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute and is Curator of exhibits and events at OPUS Archives and Research Center. She has served as a Contributing Artist-Scholar and Special Editions Editor at the Philosophical Research Society and has led many arts and music projects over the years.

Colin Dickey is the author of five books of nonfiction, including Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places, and the co-editor of The Morbid Anatomy Anthology.

Joanna Ebenstein is a Brooklyn-based artist, writer, curator, photographer and graphic designer. She is the founder and creative director of Morbid Anatomy. Her books include Memento Mori: The Art of Contemplating Death to Live a Better Life, Anatomica: The Exquisite and Unsettling Art of Human Anatomy and Death: A Graveside Companion. You can watch her Tedx Talk--Death as You've Never Seen it Before--here.

Richard Faulk is an Oakland-based writer whose work focuses on the permeable borders between science and magic, history and myth, and the trivial and the sublime. He’s the author of the books Gross America and The Next Big Thing. He also wrote the first English translation of the historic medical text Thesaurus Anatomicus, which appears in Frederik Ruysch and his Thesaurus Anatomicus, edited by Joanna Ebenstein.

Asti Hustvedt is an independent scholar with a PhD in French literature. She has written extensively on hysteria and is the author of Medical Muses: Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century Paris, which was named Editors’ Choice by The New York Times and Book of the Year by The Independent. She is also the editor of The Decadent Reader: Fiction, Fantasy and Perversion in Fin-de-Siècle France. She is currently writing a book about hysteria and the occult, focusing on female mediums and the scientists who investigated them.

Maryam Sayyad practices the art of creative yet responsible scholarship. With a PhD in Mythological Studies, an arts background, a philosophical mindset, and an evergreen urge to distill meaning from myths, she can be found writing, teaching, and speaking about mythology or otherwise creating noetic events.

Amy Slonaker, JD, PhD, is an independent scholar of religions currently teaching and writing on the intersection of myth and religion in high and low art. After receiving her undergraduate degree in Religious Studies from UC Santa Barbara she practiced law for 20+ years in San Francisco and New York City before returning to Santa Barbara to earn her PhD in 2024 at Pacifica Graduate Institute’s Mythological Studies program.

Jillian A. Tullis, PhD is Professor in the Department of Communication and is the program director for the Biomedical Ethics minor at the University of San Diego. Her teaching and research interests focus on health communication, specifically communication about dying and death. Tullis’ scholarship uses qualitative methods to study such topics as hospice team communication, tumor boards, and the concept of a “good death.”  When not talking about dying and death, Jillian likes to watch movies, especially independent films, and is working on developing her knitting skills. She’s also fortunate enough to live near the beach with her Velcro dog, Rouxbee.