Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Mortality and its Timings : When is Death Chapter 1. Introduction; Shane McCorristine. Chapter 2. Being Dead in Shakespearean Tragedy; Mary Ann Lund. Chapter 3 . A Candidate for Immortality’: Martyrdom Memory and the Marquis of Montrose; Rachel Bennett. Chapter 4. Overcoming Death: Conserving the Body in Nineteenth Century Belgium; Veronique Deblon and Kaat Wils. Chapter 5. Premature Burial and the Undertakers; Brian Parsons. Chapter 6. The Death of Nazism Investigating Hitler’s Remains and Survival Rumours in Post War Germany; Caroline Sharples Chapter 7. Death’s Impossible Date; Douglas J. Davies. Chapter 8. The Legal Definition of Death and the Right to Life; Elizabeth Wicks. Chapter 9. The Last Moment; Jonathan Rée. Chapter 10. Afterword; Thomas W. Laqueur Index This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This volume provides a series of illuminating perspectives on the timings of death through in depth studies of Shakespearean tragedy criminal execution embalming practices fears of premature burial rumours of Adolf Hitler’s survival and the legal concept of brain death. In doing so it explores a number of questions including: how do we know if someone is dead or not What do people experience at the moment when they die Is death simply a biological event that comes about in temporal stages of decomposition or is it a social event defined through cultures practices and commemorations In other words when exactly is death Taken together these contributions explore how death emerges in a series of stages that are uncertain paradoxical and socially contested.