Christina Welch

Christina Welch

Christina lectures and researches at the University of Winchester, where leads the masters degree in Death, Religion and Culture; a distance learning programme.

She lectures on Judaism, Islam, Indigenous religions, and new and alternative religions, as well in death studies generally. Her research focuses largely on religion in material and visual culture, with a Ph.D. exploring North American Indian spirituality and the development of the Pow-wow movement in England.

Her current work explores late-medieval cadaver memorials and their Roman Catholic religiosity; this has led to an unusual collaboration with an anatomical sculptor, and a forensic anatomist as well as the commissioning of a modern sculptural interpretation of a cadaver effigy. She has also teamed up with the ‘Dead Maidens’ and recently run a conference on the topic of Death and the Maiden; a subject she has written on.

Christina is dyslexic, a self-confessed shoe-aholic, a long-time single mum with 2 grown-up lads, and used to work in finance before having a family and needing to change careers; academia was not planned when she left school at 16.

Hard work and happy accidents means she sort of fell into doing what she does, but loves it.