Biography
Dr. Candi K. Cann is an Associate Professor of Religion in the Baylor Interdisciplinary Core at Baylor University. The author of four books and various articles, she recently competed a Fulbright year at Han Nam University researching the rise of the hospital funeral home in South Korea, and writing her next book on death, disability and technology for MIT Press. Please visit her website at www.deathscholar.com to learn more about her work. When she isn’t writing or teaching, she can be found reading, watching K-dramas, drinking coffee, and hanging out with her daughter and dog by the pond behind her house.
Candidate Statement
Hi there! I deeply value my membership with the AAR and am deeply committed to seeing the AAR thrive. I am currently a member of the AAR Program Unit, have served as co-chair/chair for years with the Death, Dying and Beyond (DDB) unit, and have been an AAR member since the early 2000s. As a program unit member, I have had the opportunity to work with various other units and I love working collaboratively to foster interdisciplinary religious scholarship.
Raised in Guam, Thailand and Egypt, before moving to Hawai’i as a teenager, I received my M.A. in Asian Religions from the University of Hawai’i in Mānoa, and my A.M. and Ph.D. in Comparative Religions with the Committee on the Study of Religion from Harvard University. I am currently an Associate Professor at Baylor University in the Baylor Interdisciplinary Core, and my research interest is in death, dying, and grief. I have written/edited several books, including Virtual Afterlives (UKY Press, 2014), Dying to Eat (UKY Press, 2018), Death and the Afterlife (Routledge, 2018), and Death and Religion: The Basics (Routledge, 2023); my website is www.deathscholar.com. This year, I taught at Han Nam University in Daejeon, South Korea on a Fulbright, set up an exchange partnership between Baylor and Han Nam, and conducted research on the funeral home in Korean culture, in addition to working on my latest manuscript for MIT on death, technology and disability.
I am interested in serving as the Program Unit Chair because I want to encourage transdisciplinary and collaborative scholarship in the academy and help keep the AAR viable in an increasingly challenging political climate. I also want to encourage our new generation of religion scholars to utilize their training in innovative and interesting ways in order to better educate the general public. I hope to foster bridges between the academy and industry, spotlighting the value of religious scholarship in the world today in a climate that is increasingly difficult for academics. Last, I seek to foster inclusivity and create new ways in which to foster an annual program that will cross class boundaries and encourage broader participation.