These are questions that fascinate me greatly, particularly because of my own growing interest in zombies, but also because of my obsession with understanding language and discourse as behaviors and practices in societal context.

I'd like to invite you to join me and a panel of 6 others from the Greater Philadelphia area as we discuss these and other queries on humanity in an experimental, interdisciplinary public conversation on Thursday, April 28, 7:30pm at Swarthmore College.

How did this panel come together? Well, about a month ago, I had the tremendous fortune of meeting Classics specialist Jess Wright while visiting Princeton for a workshop. A mutual friend introduced us over mint tea, and the rest was history. Literally. We talked about how people conceptualized other humans in the past, and she began telling me about her research on medieval understandings of the brain. 

Jess described how her work connected to early Christian conceptions of deviance and the Other, and where in the brain and body 4th century Europeans assumed our capacities for love, thought, and evil were stored. These were like "medieval MRIs," she added.

By Jamie A. Thomas

Where do you go when you want to explore at your own pace? When you want to learn with visual interest and engaged focus? You might end up at a museum. A place where objects, stories, and experiences are narrated through artful display and carefully crafted prose.

In Swahili, the word for museum is makumbusho, meaning a physical place of memories, related to kumbuka (remember) and kumbukumbu (memories). I like these Swahili terms because they capture the role of museums in archiving public discourse and stimulating our cultural understanding of our relationship to human events, created things, and natural phenomena. The Guardian recently had a wonderful piece on how a temporary outdoor art museum in a marginalized Mumbai community is challenging mainstream ideas of what counts as art. The Mumbai museum features the avant-garde pottery and intricate tools of local craftspeople, many of whom have never set foot in a museum space. The key revelation? "When you have a museum, you count."

Particularly because I'm chasing my own growing interest in museums, I recently set out to explore a bit of Old Sacramento on a visit with family. What I discovered enchanted me further with museum exhibits as forms of public discourse, and has me thinking about ways more of us can enjoy these spaces. And even though the power went out in one museum, this didn't spell the end of my memorable encounter.

As digital spaces become more ubiquitous, I'm finding it increasingly important to temporarily unplug and make time for physical visits to material collections. So now, I want to share with you some of the insights I gathered on visits to a variety of public history and art museums across Sacramento and Los Angeles. During my spring break from teaching, I experienced firsthand how tactile engagement, play, and ambient inspiration amplified my intercultural learning. Essentially, I found myself noticing and discovering new information during moments of wonder [and wander ] with museum collections. These are curative and educational approaches I now aim to incorporate into my own practice...

By Jamie A. Thomas

For my seminar this week, I arranged a visit to the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. We've been engaging with 19th century discourses of humanity, difference, and the body, and I wanted us to get out of the classroom to interact with materials from that time period. We were lucky enough to get up close and personal with human remains amassed (problematically) by Philadelphia physician Samuel G. Morton in the mid-1800s. These labelled skulls are now part of the eponymous collection researched and conserved by the Penn Museum. 

All semester long in my seminar, Languages of Fear, Racism, and Zombies, I've been guiding students through perspectives in critical discourse analysis and a range of discursive representations of humanity and the Other. We began with the Wild Man of the European Renaissance and traced the genealogy of this idea to the contemporary framing of Bear Grylls and his Man vs. Wild television series. Next, we began to explore Darwinian paradigm as it relates to our radicalized, gendered, and classist ideas of civilization, competition, and primitivism. We discussed the life and times of Nathaniel  Isaacs, Saartje Baartman, the implications of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and the Haitian and African origins of the zombie. Our next moves will be to examine the notion of the zombie in the context of Henrietta Lacks' immortal (and undead) cells, and the language and visual discourse of Romero's Night of the Living Dead.  

The way I see it, there's no studying the zombie without equally examining (1) what we think makes us human and (2) our fears of death, dying, and reanimation. What better way to enhance our study than to interact with a massive collection of human skulls? Admittedly, it was a bit creepy to be in a room surrounded by the ossified remains of hundreds of people I could never know. But, we were oriented by our immensely knowledgable guide, Penn Museum specialist, Paul Mitchell...  ​