This one-year project creates a Paris-based interdisciplinary research network devoted to the study of first-person narratives of dying, with a particular focus on how contemporary life writing, philosophy, and digital media reconfigure longstanding European traditions of the ars moriendi—the art of dying well. Anchored at the University of Chicago John W. Boyer Center in Paris and supported by the International Institute of Research in Paris (IIRP), the project brings together humanities scholars and medical practitioners to examine how dying is narrated, made public, and ethically mediated in contemporary culture.
The central research question—is it possible to learn how to die?—is approached through a comparative and transhistorical lens that situates modern “memoirs of the end” within a broader European intellectual genealogy. From medieval manuals that taught believers how to prepare for death, to twentieth-century continental philosophy’s insistence on the impossibility of narrating one’s own death, to today’s first-person illness memoirs and social media testimonies, European traditions have played a decisive role in shaping how death is thought, written, and shared. Paris, as a historic and contemporary crossroads for philosophy, literary theory, and medical ethics, offers an ideal site for convening these conversations.