Provost Professor of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University Bloomington Ray Cashman, who is serving this semester as BC’s Burns Visiting Scholar in Irish Studies, will deliver a lecture on April 8 at 6 p.m. on “Exploring Belief in Spirits of the Dead Among Contemporary Irish Death Care Workers.” Cashman is a folklorist trained first in religious studies and anthropology. His current book project, “The Dead Don’t Bury Themselves”: Irish Funerary Traditions in a Changing World, explores Irish wakes, funerals, and the specialists who make these rites of passage possible. According to Cashman, among those in Ireland who facilitate funeral home visitations, home wakes, removals, funerals, and burials or cremations, stories about spirits of the dead making themselves known are a significant portion of shared occupational lore that is informed by long-established beliefs and practices. These stories (termed ‘memorates’ by folklorists), combined with ethnographic observations of how death care workers perform their jobs, reveal a range of belief, disbelief, and hedged positions on the existence of spirits, an afterlife, and more mysterious aspects of reality in a supposedly disenchanted world. Cashman is the author of the award-winning books Storytelling on the Northern Irish Border: Characters and Community and Packy Jim: Folklore and Worldview on the Irish Border. A reception before the lecture will begin at 5 p.m. The reception and lecture will take place in Burns Library.