News & upcoming events
8/6/2026: Well a year of serving as Department Chair meant I didn’t update this site at all. I’ll eventually update the site with things I miss, add an updated CV, etc. but the one important piece of upcoming news is that my presentation at the American Sociological Association Annual Meetings has been moved. If you look in the program, my paper in the section on the Transnational Lives of Dead Bodies is supposed to be on the second floor of the Hilton, but it has been moved offsite. The panel will take place same time, Monday August 10, 2-3:30pm, but at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York instead. I’ll be discussing some exciting new work on news coverage of COVID-19.
4/30/2025: The Digital Departed received a fantastic review in Contemporary Sociology, and was mentioned in the Annual Review of Sociology’s new piece on “The New Sociology of Bereavement.” In February my Smith students and I presented some of our work on COVID-19 in the news media at the Eastern Sociological Society’s annual meetings.
11/16/24: The Digital Departed has received more good reviews, in Social Forces and in this blog post.
7/18/24: As the chair of the Communication, Information Technologies & Media Sociology section of the American Sociological Association, I’ll be very busy at the ASA’s annual meeting this August. We’ve organized lots of great panels, hope to see my fellow sociologists there.
The book was well-reviewed in Internet Histories and The Social Science Journal.
1/20/24: The Digital Departed was published early in the Fall and some publicity has started to emerge. Here is a running list:
The book got a great review in the journal Nature!
I did an interview with Faculti.net about it.
I put the book to the Page 99 test here.
I recommended some books about death and dying to Shepherd.com
I was interviewed about the book by the Smith Alumnae Quarterly.
I wrote a two-part essay for Death Scholars.org, the blog of the new death and dying section of the National Communication Association, called “COVID-19 and the Denial of Death.” Part I, Part II.
Timothy Recuber 