People

Dr Panagiotis Pentaris (he/him)

Dr Panagiotis Pentaris has been researching and publishing about death, dying and bereavement for over 12 years, with a particular focus on the socio-political conceptions and contestations of death, as well as the intersections of religion, faith and non-belief with death and dying.

His work has a wider scope and is underpinned by social work and social policy foundations. I have also been researching LGBTQIA+ identities and queer necropolitics for over five years, lending practices to education and end of life care, while developing EDI strategies for Higher Education.

Dr Naomi Thomson (she/her)

Dr. Naomi Thompson | Goldsmiths, University of London Dr Naomi Thompson is a sociologist of youth and religion with specialisms covering young people, youth work, religion and crime. Her work has also examined religious and secular identities in funerals.

 

 

 

 

 

Dr Carmen Yau (she/her)

Dr Carmen Yau has been researching and advocating rights and equality in death, dying and bereavement. As a disabled researcher and advocate specialising in health counselling, she focuses on the grief and loss of people with disability and the ageing population. She is also passionate about Asian death traditions and rituals, particularly Taoism and Buddhism, to understand death and dying through a sociocultural lens. Her projects include advance directives, discussion on assisted suicide among disabled people, developing social enterprise delivering green funerals & life celebrants, funeral services and grief counselling to grassroots families and immigrants.

 

Dr Vikram Kapoor (he/him)

Dr Vikram Kapoor is a Lecturer in Marketing at the IMS. His research is broadly on consumer culture, specifically consumer identity projects, religion and consumption, rituals and atmospheres. His recent works also explore object death and death rituals.

 

Dr Mischa Twitchin (he/him)

Dr Mischa Twitchin is a senior lecturer in the Theatre and Performance Dept., at Goldsmiths, University of London. He has contributed chapters to several collected volumes, as well as articles in journals such as Memory StudiesContemporary Theatre Review, and Performance Research (an issue of which, “On Animism”, 24.6, he also co-edited). His book, The Theatre of Death – the Uncanny in Mimesis: Tadeusz Kantor, Aby Warburg and an Iconology of the Actor is published by Palgrave Macmillan; and an edited volume, Wittgenstein and Performance, by Rowman and Littlefield. Examples of his performance- and essay-films can be seen on Vimeo: http://vimeo.com/user13124826/videos.

Professor Rebecca Charlton (she/her)

Professor Rebecca Charlton‘s research focuses on changes in later-life and the factors that promote healthy ageing. Her research examines cognition, social-cognitionand mood in later-life. Her work also examines how ageing effects autistic and other neurodiverse people in terms of health, cognition and well-being. Rebecca works with charity partners to examine the factors that promote well-being in ageing and individuals with dementia. She leads the GoldAge Lab.

 

Myrto Stamatopoulou (she/her)

Myrto Stamatopoulou is a photographer, PhD researcher and photography teacher in the University of West Attica in Greece. Her research focuses mainly, but not only, on the mourning postmortem photography in Greece (from the mid 19th to the mid 20th century) and the depiction of the dead body in the Arts from the Antiquity until modern times. She has participated in several conferences talking about mourning photography and has contributed the chapter Visual Narratives of Death to the collected volume “Photography and anthropological turn” (Koukkida Publications, Athens 2023).