Drawing on his recent research on mortality and persistence in Spain, Professor Andrew Ginger led a research workshop entitled “Everyone Must Die: A Guide to Survival”

Professor Ginger and the workshop participants explored how nineteenth-century Spanish notions about death often involved dying and dead people and animals persisting across place and time.

The event took place around four sections, dealing with depictions of executed rebels from the sixteenth century, a statue of a writhing dying bullfighter entitled “Nineteenth Century”, a photograph of Christopher Columbus’s armour, and taxidermied specimens from the Cabinet of Natural History in Madrid.

Themes included non-chronological forms of historicism, connections through wounds, and resurrection and eternal life through preservation of specimens.

The workshop was part of of a three day workshop entitled "Lively Corpses:  Discourses and Practices around the Dead in Nineteenth-Century Latin American and Iberian Cultures".