On Feb. 2, Fisher, a professor of theology, used his final address to his colleagues to tell his own families’ story.

“I was determined not to do one of those ‘My family is crazier than your family’ kind of histories, because I wouldn’t know how crazy anybody else’s family is,” said Fisher, who is retiring in May to spend more time in California with his son Charlie, who is autistic.

“But the complementarity of [mine and Charlie’s]cognitive systems is such a positive thing, I started to get much more positive feelings about my own family’s history. I wondered about people who may help me understand who we are.”

He discovered, among other things, that his great grandfather moved from Brooklyn to Panama in 1906 to work as a plumber on the Panama Canal. There, he became Chief and Senior Sagamore of the fraternal organization the Improved Order of Redmen.

“They wanted to transplant all the putative virtues of white American Christian Republicanism to this utopian community on the Isthmus of Panama. The Improved Order of Redmen was one of these kinds of organizations,” Fisher said, noting dryly that membership was not, in fact, open to Native Americans.

“I had to readjust the longevity of my father’s side of the families’ devotion to the Roman Catholic Church. I’d been off by 12 to 15 centuries. My great grandfather was nobody’s idea of a Roman Catholic. He was in fact, a pagan.”

He died under mysterious circumstances, and Fisher’s great grandmother moved back to Brooklyn, where Fisher discovered she lived in Vinegar Hill, next door to William Sutton, the infamous bank robber who was credited with saying he did it, “Because that’s where the money is.”

His family, which would also later call Woodbridge, New Jersey, home, also belied the popular model of Catholic immigrants flocking to parishes to create a sort of “old world communal setting.”

“My father’s family presented itself as the ultimate exemplar of just that model, but empirically it was not true. They lived where the work was; they lived on the waterfront in Brooklyn, Manhattan and North Jersey,” he said.

And although his grandparents experienced the terror of a resurgent of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920’s, they did just fine in the end.

“They were homeless in the 1930’s. By 1946, because of the war, my grandfather worked up in his job, and sent their sons to the University of Notre Dame—the eighth wonder of the world for American Catholics,” he said.

Fisher’s talk was part of Arts and Sciences Faculty Day. This year, honorees included
Christopher Aubin, Ph.D., associate professor of physics, who was honored for excellence in teaching in science and math;

Jim Fisher, Ph.D.,professor of theology, who was honored for or excellence in teaching in arts and humanities

Christina Greer, Ph.D., associate professor of political science, who was honored for excellence in teaching social sciences;

Maryann Kowaleski, P.h.D., Joseph Fitzpatrick SJ Distinguished Professor of History and Medieval Studies, who was honored for excellence in teaching in graduate studies.

The evening also celebrates 12 members of the arts and science faculty who have been chosen to work together to discuss innovative teaching techniques. The group, which includes graduate students and cuts across campuses and disciplines, meets five times a semester for two semesters to share recent scholarship in the field of teaching stories, and techniques. This year’s cohort includes:

Emanuel Fiano, Ph.D., assistant professor of theology

Abby Goldstein, associate professor of visual arts

Henry Han, Ph.D., associate professor of Computer and Information Science

Carey Kasten, Ph.D., associate professor of Spanish

Christopher Koenigsmann, Ph.D., assistant professor of chemistry

Jesus Luzardo, Ph.D. candidate of philosophy, Graduate School of Arts and Science

Jason Morris, Ph.D, associate professor of biology

Meenaserani Murugan, Ph.D., assistant professor of communications

Silvana Patriarca, Ph.D., professor of history

Kathryn Reklis, Ph.D., assistant professor of theology

Margaret Schwartz, Ph.D., associate professor of communications

Richard Teverson, assistant professor of art history

Dennis Tyler, Ph.D., assistant professor of English

Alessia Valfredini, Ph.D., lecturer of Italian

In her new book, Dead Matter: The Meaning of Iconic Corpses (University of Minnesota Press, 2015), Schwartz examines postmortem viewing practices, such as embalming, and the ritual and aesthetic roles that these play in mourning. She argues that the way we depict corpses—and which corpses we choose to depict—reveals certain truths about our conception of the human body.

“The book comes out of a very personal experience, which was seeing my father’s corpse when I was 15,” said Schwartz, PhD, an associate professor of communication and media studies.

“The difference between that moment—which was shocking enough—and the way he looked once he was embalmed and prepared—which was much worse, as I recall—sent me down this rabbit hole of wondering what kind of representational structures and techniques had intervened between the body at the moment of death and the body as it was then ‘presented’ for viewing and mourning.

“It also struck me that mourning is not something we as a culture do very well.”

Schwartz takes up the issue of postmortem photography, the aesthetic precursor to embalming in which bodies were photographed before burial. Photographers would pose the corpses so that they appeared relaxed and their faces happy, which provided grieving families with mementos of their loved ones at peace.

This serene look later translated to the embalming process, which preserves the body to allow mourners a service and final viewing. Faces receive cosmetic applications to give skin a more lifelike glow, and bodies are arranged to look at peace, as if merely asleep.

“Both photography and embalming create the experience of death and mourning as primarily visual,” Schwartz said. “It’s a denial of death and decomposition by working to restore the appearance of life.”

These visual mourning practices have social and political implications, creating what Schwartz calls a “body politic.” She cites an early English political concept that viewed the body of the king as having a dual existence: one that “ages, makes mistakes, dies,” she said, and the other, a “body politic,” which exists beyond the physical, transient body. After a king’s death, the body politic was ritually transferred from the physical body of the deceased king to the body of his successor.

Traces of this body politic still exist in our modern notions of death, Schwartz said. The death of a political leader or social figure prompts a loss beyond that of the individual.

“The body of the leader is both a personal and political entity. So, when Lincoln dies, we have a personal loss, for his family, but we also have a political situation,” Schwartz said.

“Tabloid bodies,” such as Princess Diana or Michael Jackson, and “martyred bodies,” such as Emmett Till and Hamsa al-Khateeb, also come to signify larger bodies—for instance, the plight of the marginalized or the continued value of deceased celebrities.

This move shifts our communal awareness from the deceased person to the larger body politic at work, and thus reinforces a denial of death. That focus, together with technologies and practices of mourning that work to cover up the decay of death, are partly what make us ineffectual mourners, Schwartz said.

“Death as an embodied experience has passed out of our awareness,” she said. “Accepting and understanding death and decomposition allows us to restore some dignity to the mourning process.”