The Cemetery Research Group runs two events a year: in May and in November. Follow the links and send in an abstract
Indigent/pauper funerals
Bodel, J. 2000
‘Dealing with the dead: undertakers, executioners and potter’s fields in ancient Rome’, in V. Hope & E. Marshall (eds) Death and Disease in the Ancient City, London: Routledge, 128-151.
Bray, R.S. 2023
‘Carceral archipelago and gulag of grief: Hart Island’, in J. Michael Ryan (ed.) Covid-19: Surviving a Pandemic, London: Routledge, 46-56.
Bregman, L 2021
Funeral for a homeless vagrant? Religious and social margins’, Religions 12:1, 30.
Caswell, G. 2019
‘Local authority funerals in early 21st century Scotland’, in P.J. Jupp and H. Grainger (eds) Death in Scotland: Chapters from the Twelfth Century to the Twenty-First, Edinurgh: Peter Lang, 299-320.
Dennie, G. 2009
‘The standard of dying: race, indigence, and the disposal of the dead body in Johannesburg, 1886-1960’, African Studies, 63: 3, 310-330.
Denyer Willis, G. 2018
‘The potter’s field’, Comparative Studies in History and Society, 60:3, 539-568.
Drybread, K. 2013
‘Social life and the deaths of Brazilian street children’, Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthrpology, 18:2, 212-230.
Gijbels, J. 2018
‘Reassessing the pauper burial: the disposal of corpses in nineteenth-century Brussels’, Mortality, 23:2, 184-198.
Gopp, A. 2007
‘Ritualizing with the poor: the potters’ field memorial service’, Liturgy, 23:1, 15-19.
Guffanti, L. 2015
‘Volunteers and the French pauper burial: do it yourself?’ Mortality, 20:1, 67-82.
Henriot, C. 2009
“Invisible deaths, silent deaths”: “bodies without masters” in Republican Shanghai’, Journal of Social History, 43:2, 407-37.
Hurren, E. & King, S. 2005
“Begging for a burial”: form, function and conflict in nineteenth-century pauper burial’, Social History, 30, 3, 321-341.
King, S. 2022
‘Remembering the dead poor in the Midlands, 1750s to 1880s’, Midland History, 47:3, 292-312.
Laqueur, T. 1983
‘Bodies, death and pauper funerals’, Representations, 1, 109-31.
Lassère, M. 1995
‘Les pauvres et al mort en mileu urbain dans la France du XIXe siècle: funérailles et cimetières’, Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine, 42, 107-25.
Moerman, L. & Van der Laan, S. 2021
‘Paupers, burial clubs and funeral insurance: calculating moral panics’, The British Accounting Review, 53:2, 100911.
Portier, T. 2025
‘Stigmatising poverty: understanding the treatment of poor and destitute bodies in British cities (1800–60)’, Human Remains and Violence: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 11:1, 1-19.
Raudon, S. 2022
‘Huddled masses: the shock of Hart Island, New York’, Human Remains and Violence: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 8:1, 84-101.
Richardson, R. 1987
Death, Dissection and the Destitute, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Sheppard-Simms, E. 2016
‘Islands of the abject: absence, trauma and memory in the cemetery island’, Heritage of Violence, 4:1, Article 2.
