Kelly Christian

Profile picture of Dilettante Army Author Kelly Christian

Kelly Christian is a writer, maker, and thinker based in Chicago. She is interested in visual representations of death and their cultural ramifications. After photographing military funerals in Maine during the height of the Iraq War, Kelly realized that there was no turning back from the dark side. When not totally delighted by the macabre, Kelly is making bad jokes, hanging out with cats, indulging in tacos or trying to go to every obscure museum out there.

Virtual Burial Plots: A Conversation between Kelly Christian and Jed Brubaker

A conversation about Facebook legacy pages and what happens to our data after we die

Cost of Living: Life Insurance and Burial in Black Chicago

Black funeral service providers’ long fight against discrimination in life insurance

A Gloomy and Tedious Period: Learning from 1816

From volcanic eruptions to hurricanes, from classic novels to migration waves

It’s in the Cloud: Miasma, Healthcare.gov, and Computing

The history of health in clouds, from miasmas to digital healthcare and “cloud campuses”

The Trump Who Cried Witch: Unruly Language and the American Witch Hunt

Speech, defamation, and witchcraft (on Twitter and in the transcripts of the Salem Witch Trials)

Psychic Violence: the Hauntings of Sarah Winchester

Ongoing narratives of colonialist expansion in San Jose, CA

Preserving Culture, or a Brief History of the Jackalope

Commercial tourism and the great America that never was

General Access: Hair Jewelry and Godey’s Lady’s Book

The commodification of sentimental culture

Unruly: Hair, Politics and Memorial

remembrance and the body in Victorian hair wreaths

A Wrinkle in Time: the Horniman walrus and colonial legacy

The hidden history of a rather large taxidermy speciman

Dead Celebs

David Bowie and public memory

Death Ladies

the feminized narrative of funerals

Brutal Advertising

evidence and profit

Re-Enacting Whiteness

Lincoln’s Springfield funeral

Grief and Undoing

We are all going to die.

Hollow Hallows

getting creepy

Finding Ferguson in Visual Culture

lynching photographs and Michael Brown

It’s Not Right But It’s Okay: Looking at Postmortem Photographs (of Whitney Houston)

In the National Enquirer, the reality of death becomes as strange and superficial as the surrounding fictions.

Tupac Hologram

Who says I’m dead?

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