This post is from one of my new ventures with fellow museum/death colleague, Dr. Trish Biers. Read more about our work in public engagement, museums, human remains, and death at MorsMortisMuse.wordpress.com, and on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook at @MorsMortisMuse
Welcome to Mors Mortis Museum!
Mors Mortis Museum began as an international collaboration between Drs. Trish Biers and Katie Clary in 2017. In 2019 we launched a social media presence, and we plan to continue to grow our collective with blogs, interviews, meet-ups, and workshops or a conference. One of the main purposes of the group is to foster conversation that will lead to better practice and protocol for how museums and institutions do public engagement with human remains. Additionally, we hope to help create conversation with new narratives about collecting and acquisition along with evaluating how museums are responding to increasing transparency about their collections.
Please feel free to contact us with questions, comments, pitches for blogs, more information, or just for a chat. You can also read more about us, our motives, and the people behind MMM on our About Us page.
We are compiling a working list of Information and Resources about death, museums, human remains, and more. Please contact us or comment to let us know about resources we should include. This is a growing and evolving list that is no where near comprehensive (yet!).
Find us on Twitter @MorsMortisMuse, and on Facebook and don’t forget to subscribe or follow our our blog.
Looking forward to many conversations, workshops, and more in the future,
Trish + Katie
At the end of October I set up (rather ambitious) goals to take part in AcWriMo2018 (Academic Writing Month). I was inspired by Katy Peplin, PhD who organized a bunch of us with the hashtag, slack channels, writing retreats, and more wonderful (FREE) resources. Check out her website at 
The big thing was the book proposal, and I’m so thankful to all of you who looked over it and made incredible comments and just let me bounce ideas off of you and think out-loud via text. More to come on that in the future. I know blogs don’t really “count” for anything, but I made them a goal to get myself just writing words and typing things out and getting them out of my head; and it worked! They were also a great way to feel like I was accomplishing something when other projects were stalled. The submitted blog was originally going to be something completely different until I woke up one morning thinking about the 
The Bonuses I got done worked out to be: 2 abstracts for presentations at a Death Conference, abstract for a chapter proposal submitted, proposal to museums conference submitted, kept caught up on grading, discussions and putting out feelers for an edited volume with an amazing group of women, making progress on a collective of death studies individuals working towards radicalized death studies, got Zotero all set up for the new project, posted all of my student blogs (check them out at 
So final thoughts on this: no way would I have gotten as much done as I did without community and support from friends and colleagues (shout out to Twitter, for real). Having people just text and say, “are you writing today? let’s do a pom,” or listening, or sharing stupid gifs made a word of distance. Second, actually writing out these goals (and rewards, which I haven’t gotten around to yet – tragedy!) and making a plan – 
Because of timing and a twist of good luck, my mom was able to join me on this trip as a research assistant extraordinaire and travel buddy! This was her first trip out of the country, and our first time traveling just the two of us, and turns out that we travel absolutely swimmingly together (unless one of us is slurping a hot drink or smacking gum and then things can get tense for a hot second). My mom was an absolute trooper on this trip; walking miles and miles across London, going to all of the museums and actually enjoying them, taking selfies without complaint, listening with actual interest every time I started off on a “DID YOU KNOW….“ tangent at a museum or historic place. So yeah, all of that to say, my mom is the best and I can’t wait to travel with her again.
That said, we got to see Trafalgar, Tower Bridge, the Thames, and St. Paul’s Cathedral while still in a jetlag fog. Then back to rest so we could have a full day of museums and sites the following day… coming up: death tourism in London, Tower of London, Victoria and Albert, Natural History Museum, British Museum (redux), and Museum of London: Docklands!
I accepted a new position as Assistant Professor of History, Public History at Coastal Carolina University in the spring! I’m thrilled to get to continue my work here in South Carolina with Public history, access, human remains, and cultural heritage.
Most recently, I traveled to the UK to do some research on human remains in several museums in London, and then I traveled up to York to present at the Death and Culture Network conference at the University of York. What an amazing conference and group of people to be a part of. I can’t wait to share more with you about the conference, potential projects coming out of it, and the rad people I met. In the meantime, check out the 
This semester I’m working with a research fellow from my college to develop a full-scale Reacting to the Past game based on a mini-game I created last fall about the development of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. What an incredible melding of all of my interests – pedagogy, game play, human remains, cultural heritage, and public history – all in one! Happily, my workshop on this topic with the incomparable Dr. Abby Gautreau and Dan Ott has been accepted for NCPH 2019; see you all soon in Hartford!
