The Gravestone Project (TGP) is a collective that seeks to center the methodologies of the humanities and arts to investigate aspects of 17th- to 19th-century memorials and memorial cultures. We particularly focus on the ways that literary scholarship, cultural history, and the arts can enrich our understanding of the objects, spaces, ideas, and beliefs that characterize approaches to death and memorialization.

As a collective, TGP houses within it multiple initiatives that consider different aspects of, and different methods of responding to, memorialization. Although each project has distinct parameters, our intention is that the projects will enrich one another by facilitating conversations and the sharing of data.

Our newest project is Memorial 20/70, which will collect and analyze memorial objects and texts related to deaths in the centenary and semicentenary decades between the 1620s and the 1920s. We have just published the second volume of Grave Notes, a scholarly journal that features essays investigating the connections between burial sites, culture, and the arts. We also house galleries of photographs of cemeteries that contain pre-1900 memorials, as well as photographs of the gravesites of individuals of significance to history and/or the arts. More information about the methodology of different TGP initiatives can be found on the pages for those initiatives.

These and other projects currently in development within the Gravestone Project collective aim to facilitate the exploration of educators, writers, students, artists, scholars, and all others who are interested in cultures of memorialization.