Area chair
Richard A. Sauers (Riverview Cemetery)
This area includes general topics including but not limited to the following: attitudes toward and practices relating to death, including the medicalization of death, the social construction of death, death in art and literature, funeral customs, the evolution of the funeral business and the cemetery, changing attitudes toward the dead body and its disposal, and burial and mourning practices as well as memorialization, including the history, iconography, and rhetoric of gravemarkers and memorials; regional and ethnic practices; and gender, class, and race in the cemetery.