Welcome Daniel Burrell

Welcome Daniel Burrell

The Centre for Death and Life Studies is pleased to welcome Mr. Daniel Burrell as the newest centre linked postgraduate. Daniel was kind enough to provide a brief bio of his research and how it links to the Centre for Death and Life Studies.

---

I am a PhD student with the History Department at Durham University, currently funded through the Wolfson Postgraduate Scholarship in the Humanities. I previously completed both my Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in History at Durham as well, during which my research focused predominantly upon the changing conceptualisations of death and disposal in modern Britain. My current research builds on this experience by attempting to rethink cremationism in late nineteenth-century Britain as an eclectic and pluralistic philosophy or ideology. I am ultimately trying to consider how cremationism functioned as a space for the conceptualisation and contestation of key ideas and concerns related to the emergence of an imagined modernity. I am particularly interested in thinking about concepts related to race and the ‘other’, religion and spirituality, sentimentality and the self, as well as nationhood and empire. The Cremation Society of Great Britain’s archive, currently held and curated by Durham University, has so far proven to be an invaluable resource for my primary research. This resource, alongside its close association with the Centre for Death and Life Studies, has made Durham an ideal place to study and a place in which I would like to continue working in the future.