Dr. Candi Cann, associate professor of religion, teaches at Baylor University in both the Baylor Interdisciplinary Core and the religion department. She received 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. She has published five books and numerous articles and book chapters. Her first book, Virtual Afterlives: Grieving the Dead in the Twenty-first Century (University Press of Kentucky, 2014), centers on grief and memorialization in the contemporary world. Dying to Eat: Cross Cultural Perspectives on Food, Death and the Afterlife (University Press of Kentucky, 2017) is an edited collection on the intersection of food in death and grief. 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 most recent book, Death and Religion: The Basics (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. Finally, she has a forthcoming book with MIT press titled Augmented, which discusses the intersection of death, disability, and technology, and will be published in 2025. In addition to her writing, Dr. Cann’s work has been featured in podcasts, films, and interviews with the BBC, NPR, C-SPAN’s Book TV, Milk Street, Financial Times, Washington Post, and many others. You can find her online at www.deathscholar.com.
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, creating pottery, or drinking coffee and reading books.