This weekend, an intense smell enveloped New York Botanical Garden visitors (and another such event just took place in Washington, DC). For the second time in nearly 80 years an enormous rare flower bloomed in the garden emitting the strong and unsettling smell of rotting carrion. The titan arum (Amorphophallus titanum) belongs to a group of "corpse flowers" or "carrion flowers" as they are aptly referred to, that includes the rafflesias, stapelias and some of the bulbophillu

Corpses, Cadavers and Catalogues: The Mobilities of Dead Bodies and Body Parts, Past and Present is an interdiscplinary seminar happening in May 17-18, 2016 in London and I have the pleasure to be one of the speakers! CCC aims to "bring together museum professionals and academics to foster a productive dialogue on the movement of the dead body and the social, ethical and political challenges it presents. In contrast to the breadth of current research on the movement of the