Fellow Project
2024–2025
A New Death Cultures of Dying in France
This project examines palliative care–the paradigmatic end-of-life care modality in the West since the 1970s–and assisted dying, an umbrella term encompassing both assisted suicide and euthanasia, in French literature, philosophy, and visual culture. The research will result in a book manuscript excavating a new cultural history of dying in contemporary France. By drawing on a mostly unexplored corpus of material–autobiographical writing, documentary film, and photography that engage with palliative care and assisted dying–the project opens new avenues for understanding the interplay between culture, history, and medicine’s relationship with death in France. It argues that the diverse aesthetic representations of dying are part of a broader cultural tradition, while also being intricately linked to with idiosyncratic local, historical, and national contexts of end-of-life care.
