Lora Arduser (she/her/hers)

Associate Professor | Director, Professional and Technical Writing Program

University of Cincinnati

Description of Work

I’m working on a chapter of a book project. The project draws on RHM, death studies and material culture studies in anthropology to develop an interdisciplinary approach to agency and personhood that can be understood through the care of corpses. The corpse, most often thought of as a body that shifts from a souled person with agency and identity to an object, can have powerful rhetorical implications for personhood. The chapter I am bring to the symposium discusses embalming practices in the U.S. since the Civil War. Embalming, a technological process that stops the processes of time, is described by Harris in his book Grave Matters as being both technical and intimate, involving the knowledge and use of chemicals and technologies but also a form of tenderness through acts of touch and sight. The chapter will discuss the embalmed face as both personal funeral monument, national/public memory (Lincoln and JFK), exhibition (Body Worlds and the Bigsa Man), and protest (Emmett Till). To do so, I draw on both interviews with individual in the mortuary field and archival resources.

Contact: lora.arduser@uc.edu