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The Executioner, Unhooded

The hooded, masked executioner haunts the imagination and practice of capital punishment, from the artifact collections of the Tower of London and the Wellcome, to the state of Florida, whose executioner wears a supposedly “medieval” hood. But the historic record tells a different story of the death penalty, of a supposedly sinister and violent medieval past invented to conceal the machinations of modern violence and injustice. This illustrated talk will explore—and debunk—the invention of the executioner as hooded Grim Reaper, in art, in torture museum curation, and in the death chambers of the contemporary U.S.”

Alison Kinney is the author of Hood (Bloomsbury 2016), a cultural history of secrecy, suffering, and the hoods we all wear. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Hyperallergic, the New York Times, and other publications.











When: Sat., Jan. 30, 2016 at 8:00 pm
Where: Morbid Anatomy Museum
424 Third Ave. Brooklyn

Price: $8
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The hooded, masked executioner haunts the imagination and practice of capital punishment, from the artifact collections of the Tower of London and the Wellcome, to the state of Florida, whose executioner wears a supposedly “medieval” hood. But the historic record tells a different story of the death penalty, of a supposedly sinister and violent medieval past invented to conceal the machinations of modern violence and injustice. This illustrated talk will explore—and debunk—the invention of the executioner as hooded Grim Reaper, in art, in torture museum curation, and in the death chambers of the contemporary U.S.”

Alison Kinney is the author of Hood (Bloomsbury 2016), a cultural history of secrecy, suffering, and the hoods we all wear. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Hyperallergic, the New York Times, and other publications.

Buy tickets/get more info now