The Secure Talk Podcast

Dr Candi K. Cann is a Professor at Baylor University with a research focus on death, dying, and grief, and the intersections of marginality, diversity, and death technologies.

She holds a PhD and A.M. in Comparative Religion from Harvard University, an M.A. in Asian Religions from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, and a B.A. in Asian Studies and English from St. Andrews. Her four previous books — Virtual Afterlives (2014), Dying to Eat (2017), The Routledge Handbook of Death and Afterlife (2018) and Death and Religion: The Basics (2022)— along with widely cited work on digital death and COVID-19 grief, have established her as a leading voice on how cultures around the world remember, mourn, and memorialize the dead. 

Her latest book,  Augmented: Life and Death as a Cyborg (MIT Press, 2026), is a provocative rethinking of the intersection of death, technology, and disability. Drawing on her own experience with hearing aids since age four, Dr Cann challenges readers to reconsider their assumptions about life-extending technologies and what it means to age and die in an increasingly medicalized world. The book weaves in cross-cultural perspectives — contrasting Western anxieties about machines with animistic worldviews that see technology as a conduit of care and spiritual possibility.