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Hello and welcome to my website. I’m Professor Kate Woodthorpe, a UK academic who specialises in the social aspects of death, dying and bereavement. In other words, I’m interested in what makes us human: our mortality.

Why be interested in the end of life? Isn’t it morbid?

I find the end of life endlessly interesting and see that how we handle and respond to dying, death and loss reflects what we value in life. You can find out more about my views on living and dying on The Death Studies Podcast or the Part of Life blog.

My interest in the end of life stems from personal experience, which I have written about elsewhere,  and which is always being expanded as I age myself and now have my own family. You can read more about my campaigns under my married name Kate Tuckwell.

I currently work as a Professor of Sociology at the University of Bath, UK, where I am co-director of the Centre for Death and Society, the UK’s only research centre devoted to the study of social aspects of death, dying and bereavement. I am an experienced academic, having completed my PhD at the University of Sheffield in 2007 and working solidly in the higher education sector since. I was editor of the journal Mortality between 2015 and 2019, and now sit on its editorial board as well as the editorial boards for Death Studies and Omega. I have acted as Special Advisor to the Department for Work and Pensions (2016) and Competition and Markets Authority (2019 and 2020). In 2023 and 2024 I was awarded UKRI funding to work on two projects to submit to the Law Commission.

While I specialise in talking about all things end of life, families, funerals and bereavement, I like to debunk some of the mysteries around being a successful academic. I have written a mentoring book called Survive and Thrive in Academia on the early years of your career in higher education, and I have also written about being a working parent and carer for my son, and on the value of auto/biography and risks of personal disclosure within academia.

This personal website is a way to contact me, find out more about the work I do, and to
see how I might be able to work with you. I hope and trust you will find it helpful. Do get in touch.

You can find me on LinkedIn here.