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Postgraduates

Student Daniel BurrellMr Daniel Burrell
daniel.d.burrell@durham.ac.uk
Department of History, Durham University

Daniel Burrell is a historian specialising in the emergence of 'Cremationism' as an eclectic phenomenon in late nineteenth-century Britain. Daniel is currently a PhD student at our Centre for Death and Life Studies under the supervision of Professor Julie-Marie Strange.  His PhD project, Race, Religion, Nationhood, and Empire: Rethinking Cremationism in Late Nineteenth-Century Britain, attempts to rethink 'Cremationism' as a broad and pluralistic philosophy, rather than a discrete social movement, which served as a space for the conceptualisation and contestation of an imagined modernity. Daniel's broader interests include the significance of British and global public engagement with the century's recursive tropes of race and the 'other', class division, religious pluralisation, gender, sexuality, the family, as well as British nationhood and empire. The Cremation Society Archives, curated by Durham University, have proven to be an invaluable resource for Daniel's primary research. 

Dr Myongjin Agnes Cho
myongjin.a.cho@durham.ac.uk
Department of Theology and Religion, Durham University
Myongjin Agnes Cho is a palliative care physician from South Korea and recently became a Fellow of the Institute of Medical Humanities at Durham University. Agnes is currently a PhD student at our Centre for Death and Life Studies under the supervision of Professor Douglas Davies. Her PhD project, the EDU-AM (Ars Moriendi) Initiative, aims to develop a new death education programme for medical professionals in South Korea, with strategic innovations in theory and practice tailored to the South Korean medical system and cultural contexts. This marks the first step in trialing a new pedagogical approach to death and dying for medical professionals which sets medical knowledge and end-of-life care techniques within a deeper philosophical and existential appreciation of death. In addition to her role as Programme Manager at Oxford Humans, Agnes is currently co-developing an international consortium of scholars and practitioners across the UK, US, Japan, and South Korea to focus on a death education syllabus and, more specifically, on how to humanize the dying process in the 21st Century.