What does life look like after death—individual deaths as well as the collective extinctions of family lineages, societies, and ecologies? The afterlife has appeared on a sliding scale of literalness, from historical cases of wandering souls and ancestral villages to modern anticipations of digital immortality and ecological imaginations of a “world without us.” Far from fanciful daydreams or anxious denials of mortality, afterlives have always been tied to moral, social, and political visions. It has provided judgment after death and grounded karmic inheritance, been imagined as the condition of hope or social stability. In other words, the afterlife matters. This course provides an overview of historical and contemporary visions of life after death. It examines a wide range of sources spanning philosophy, social science, and literature, familiarizing students to different forms of the afterlife and intermittent anxieties about its demise. The course will center ethnographic accounts of the afterlife and its place within social life, inviting students to critically examine everyday uses of the afterlife. In a time redolent with end-time narratives and easy blueprints for survival, it is worth asking: who, or what is dying? Why does it matter? What comes after?