Frances Larson is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Durham and the author of AN INFINITY OF THINGS: How Sir Henry Wellcome Collected the World and SEVERED. She lives in Durham.
From the Western collectors whose demand for shrunken heads spurred massacres to Second World War soldiers who sent the remains of the Japanese home to their girlfriends, from Madame Tussaud modeling the guillotined head of Robespierre to Damien Hirst photographing decapitated heads in city morgues, from grave-robbing phrenologists to skull-obsessed scientists, Frances Larson explores our macabre fixation with severed heads.