Dr. Candi Cann

BIC Courses: World Cultures, Social World

Dr. Candi K. Cann, Associate Professor of Religion in the BIC, teaches at Baylor University in both the BIC and the Religion department. She received both her M.A. and Ph.D. in Comparative Religion from Harvard University, an M.A. in Asian Religions from the University of Hawai'i at Manoa, and a B.A. in Asian Studies and English from St. Andrews in North Carolina. In 2023, she held a Fulbright at Han Nam University, in Daejeon, South Korea.

Dr. Cann's research focuses on death and dying, and the impact of remembering (and forgetting) in shaping how lives are recalled, remembered, and celebrated. Her first book, Virtual Afterlives: Grieving the Dead in the Twenty-first Century with the University Press of Kentucky (2014), centered on grief and memorialization in the contemporary world. She has also written various chapters and articles on digital death and grief. Her second book, Dying to Eat: Cross Cultural Perspectives on Food, Death and the Afterlife (also with University Press of Kentucky, 2017) is an edited collection on the intersection of food in death and grief. Her third book, The Routledge Handbook of Death and Afterlife (Routledge, 2018) is an edited collection containing thirty chapters examining death and afterlife from around the world. Her last book, Death and Religion: The Basics, also with Routledge (2023) examined the role of religion in death, dying and grief around the world, and argues that medical culture may be nearly as important as religious worldviews in determining how one views death and the afterlife. Currently, she is working on a fifth book on the intersection of death, disability, and technology with MIT.

At Baylor, she teaches World Cultures, Social World, World Religions, Buddhism, Christian Heritage, and Death and Dying, and she is an Advisor to Baylor’s Hawai’i Club. When she isn’t writing or in the classroom, she can be found hanging out with her family, doing pottery, or drinking coffee and reading books.

Check out her website: www.deathscholar.com and this Patheos film, A Good Goodbye, featuring her work.

• Academic CV
• Recent Research Grants
  • https://louisville-institute.org/awards/project-grant-for-researchers/13248/
  • https://csr.princeton.edu/about/people/visiting-fellows/candi-k-cann/
• Amazon
• Popular Writing
  • Huffington Post
  • Harvard Divinity School Cosmologics
• Twitter: @CandiCann