This panel considers how scholars who study memory objects of the dead navigate the expectations of academic writing and disciplinary boundaries that treat these objects as dead, secular objects and/or non-supernatural signifiers of the past. Papers examine writing about memory objects of the dead in disciplines that treat the objects themselves as dead objects; scholarly methods and/or editorial processes that privilege secular methods for studying and writing about memory objects of the dead; narratives about memory objects of the dead from scholars’ own lives that reveal challenges in writing about death and material culture; and tensions between writing about death and material culture and dedicating books in memory of the dead.
Jamie Brummitt’s Protestant Relics in Early America (2025) offers a vital exploration of "supernatural memory objects," arguing early American grief and politics were rooted in holy matter. However, Brummitt’s work also highlights a pervasive tension within Religious Studies: an "autobiographical refusal." While Brummitt illuminates the vibrant emotional lives of her subjects, the academic demand for "objectivity" often flattens the scholar's own life-narrative. I argue that scholars are constrained by a form of academic secular privatization, trained to excise personal histories from the page. Beneath the critical prose lies a Durkheimian "effervescence"—dreams, affections, and indeed a life woven through communion—that electrifies the writing yet remains unacknowledged. By examining the book itself as a memory object, I contend that integrating autotheoretic reflection would strengthen the critique against secular reductionism. Acknowledging the "life" beneath the scholarship renders the study of religion more compelling and only deepens the complexity of the book's argument.
What effect does it have on us when the voices of the dead resurface? How can we engage with the traces and voices of our families in once-lost, analogue, and dead media? This presentation is an ethnographer’s reflection on the discovery of decades-old family oral histories recorded on cassette tapes. The cassette is an outdated and frail, yet durable medium for preserving voice. Through the voices of her maternal ancestors and the imperfect medium of a tape player, she explores Nuyorican family histories of forgetting and the pain and comfort found in women’s silences and their refusals to remember.
This paper explores the relationship between grief, material culture, and scholarly method through reflections drawn from my forthcoming book, When God Is Silent: Love, Lament, and the Work of Staying (Cascade Books, 2026). Focusing on what may be called “memory objects of the dead”, ordinary items that become charged with meaning after loss, the paper examines the methodological challenges of writing about such objects within academic disciplines that often treat them as inert artifacts. Drawing on theology, ethics, and material culture studies, I argue that prevailing scholarly approaches can overlook the relational dimensions that give these objects their power for those who grieve. Through the example of “The Box,” a collection of personal items belonging to a deceased child, the paper reflects on how memory objects mediate presence, absence, and longing; proposing a more relational approach to studying material culture and death.
This paper examines the tensions of writing about personal experiences of death and grief within academic disciplines that privilege emotional distance over intimacy. Focusing on material artifacts belonging to my deceased loved ones—particularly my mother—I interrogate how scholarly conventions render such objects as lifeless rather than relational. Writing from intimate proximity becomes a methodological challenge to dominant modes of scholarly analysis that require emotional detachment. In do so, this paper explores what it means to take seriously the afterlives of material objects as sites of memory, presence, ongoing personal relational formation, and as counters to biological and academic disappearance.
This paper examines how memory objects associated with the dead are interpreted in Akan and Ga communities in Ghana and how these interpretations challenge the limits of academic language. In West African cosmologies, death is understood not as the end of existence but as a transition of the deceased who continue to participate in social and moral life. Objects such as blackened stools in Akan traditions and symbolic coffins in Ga funeral practices are therefore not simply relics of the past but important artifacts to remember the dead, by defining or preserving identity, and maintaining connections with ancestors. However, academic writing usually frames such objects as symbolic evidence, overlooking how communities understand them spiritually. The paper argues for a community-centered approach, allowing scholars to study these objects academically while also explaining the spiritual meanings attached to the relics by the communities that created them.