Death has been deemed the great equalizer, but each journey towards our shared, ultimate fate is unique. The length of our lives, the quality of our last days, how our deaths are perceived by others, and the handling of our remains are governed by nature and many socio-cultural factors. Unequal Before Death is an edited collection that addresses inequalities surrounding death from the perspectives of scholars in a wide range of humanistic and social science disciplines, including art history, anthropology, Film and media studies, political science, popular culture, psychology, religion, sociology, and statistics. The majority of the chapters of this interdisciplinary anthology are revised versions of papers presented at the second Austin H. Kutscher Memorial Conference, entitled Unequal Before Death, organized by the Columbia University Seminar on Death in March 2010 and attended by leading experts in academia, healthcare and the not-for-profit sector. The purpose of this volume is to bring attention to the many inequalities affecting the end of life experience and to encourage collaborative research and action that can improve the experience for the dying and those around them. This volume does not question the truism of death as the ultimate equalizer but rather, seeks to explore the many ways in which the final journey is not equal.
About the Author: Christina Staudt (Ph.D. Art History, Columbia University) is the Chair of the Columbia University Seminar on Death and the co-founder of the Westchester End-of-Life Coalition. She is the co-editor of The Many Ways We Talk About Death in Contemporary Society (Mellen 2009) and contributed chapters on the literature of death and dying and on the imagery of death after 9/11 for Speaking of Death - America's New Sense of Mortality, Michael Bartalos, ed. (Praeger 2009). She organizes events and speaks in the public and professional arena to promote a better end-of-life experience for patients and their families and has been an active hospice volunteer for fifteen years. Marcelline Block's publications include World Film Locations: Paris and World Film Locations: Las Vegas. Her Situating the Feminist Gaze and Spectatorship in Postwar Cinema was selected as Book of the Month in January 2012 by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. It is translated into Italian as Sguardo e pubblico femminista nel cinema del dopoguerra as part of the Universita degli Studi di L'Aquila's Cinema ed estetica cinematografica series (Aracne editrice). She co-edited Gender Scripts in Medicine and Narrative and Critical Matrix: The Princeton Journal of Women, Gender and Culture (vol. 18). Her articles are published in Excavatio: Realism and Naturalism in Film Studies (vol. 22), The Harvard French Review (vol. 2), and LINE: Journal of the Hadar Foundation (vol. 1). She contributed chapters to The Many Ways We Talk about Death in Contemporary Society; Vendetta: Essays on Honor and Revenge, and Cherchez la femme: Women and Values in the Francophone World. Her writing in French appears in Vingtieme siecle: revue d'histoire (vol. 96). Her art criticism was translated into Russian for Russian Art beyond Borders: Late 20th Century-Early 21st Century (National Center for Contemporary Art, Moscow). She has taught in several departments at Princeton, including as a Lecturer in History.