Landscapes of Immortality

Landscapes of Immortality, a new collaborative project with the University of Edinburgh (PIs Elaine Treharne and Greg Walker), investigates sacred sites across cultures to evaluate how humans have sought to remember their holy figures and their loved ones, and to perform spiritual connection between the mundane and the transcendent. The desire to be remembered oneself is bound up with the desire to enact memorialization of others. As such, key areas of examination will be monuments and graveyards; pilgrimages to and rituals involved in sacred sites; and vernacular memorials and more official efforts to make permanent the memory of individuals through history. The implications of humans' desires to be remembered, and to discover places and spaces of 'fastness' and the eternal, are especially important in the current world of pandemic and socio-economic crisis.