Keynotes

Jan Baars

Jan Baars is Professor of Interpretive Gerontology at the University for Humanistics in Utrecht, NL. He studied Social Sciences and Philosophy in Amsterdam, NL, Bielefeld, DE and Berkeley, US. His academic background in continental philosophy and Critical Theory (Adorno, Horkheimer, Habermas, Foucault) has inspired him to help in establishing the paradigm of 'critical gerontology.' His main interests are theoretical and practical presuppositions in approaches to aging, especially concepts of time and temporality. His forthcoming book is called Aging beyond the numbers of Time. He is a fellow of the Gerontological Society of America and a member of the editorial board of journals such as the International Journal of Aging and Later Life and the Journal of Aging, Humanities and the Arts.

Thomas Cole

Thomas R. Cole is the McGovern Chair in Medical Humanities and Director of the McGovern Center for Humanities and Ethics at UTHEALTH in Houston, US. Cole graduated from Yale University (BA Philosophy, 1971), Wesleyan University (MA History, 1975) and the University of Rochester, (PhD History, 1981). He has published many articles and several books on the history of aging and humanistic gerontology and his book The Journey of Life: A Cultural History of Aging in America (1992) was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. He is senior editor of What Does It Mean to Grow Old? (1986), and mostly recently, with Ruth Ray and Robert Kastenbaum, Guide to Humanistic Studies in Aging (2010). Cole serves as an advisor to the United Nations NGO Committee on Ageing, and various editorial and foundation boards.

Anne Basting

Anne Basting (PhD) is the Director of the Center on Age & Community and an Associate Professor in the Department of Theatre at the Peck School of the Arts, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, US. Basting has written extensively on issues of aging and representation, including two books, Forget Memory: Creating Better Lives for People with Dementia (2009) and The Stages of Age: Performing Age in Contemporary American Culture. Her numerous articles and essays have been published across multiple disciplines including journals such as The Drama Review, American Theatre, and Journal of Aging Studies, and anthologies Figuring Age, Mental Wellness in Aging, the Handbook for the Humanities and Aging, and Aging and the Meaning of Time. Basting is the recipient of a Rockefeller Fellowship, a Brookdale National Fellowship, and numerous major grants for her scholarly and creative endeavours.

Roberta Maierhofer

Roberta Maierhofer is Professor at the Department of American Studies of the University of Graz, Austria, and Adjunct Professor at Binghamton University, New York. Since 2007, she has acted as Academic Director of the Center for the Study of the Americas of the University of Graz. Her research focuses on American Literature and Cultural Studies, Feminist Literature and Research, Transatlantic Cooperation in Education, and Age/Aging Studies. Roberta Maierhofer holds a master’s and a doctoral degree from the University of Graz as well as an M.A. degree in Comparative Literature from SUNY Binghamton. In her monograph, Salty Old Women: Gender and Aging in American Culture, she developed a theoretical approach to gender and aging (anocriticism).

Margaret Morganroth Gullette

A recipient of NEH, ACLS, and Bunting Fellowships, Margaret Morganroth Gullette is a scholar at the Women’s Studies Research Center, Brandeis University. Her book, Aged by Culture, was chosen as a “Noteworthy Book of the Year” by the Christian Science Monitor. Declining to Decline won the Emily Toth Award as the best feminist book on American popular culture. Margaret’s focus on the midlife (the Midlife Fiction series: Safe at Last in the Middle Years and Declining to Decline) has expanded to become a new approach called Age Studies. In her recent book Agewise: Fighting the New Ageism in America, Gullette critiques the ageism and middle ageism that drive discontent with our bodies, our accomplishments, and our selfhood after youth, and even endanger our end-of-life care.

Philip Tew

Philip Tew is Professor of English (Post-1900 Literature) at Brunel, the elected Director of the UK Network for Modern Fiction Studies, Director of the Brunel Centre for Contemporary Writing (BCCW), Co-Editor of both Critical Engagements and of Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a Member of the Royal Society of Literature. Tew’s major research interests are various, including deploying narrative for sociological research, post-1945 and contemporary fiction and culture, and theoretical readings of literature generally. Together with a team of academics from Brunel (including Dr. Nick Hubble and Dr. Jago Morrison) Tew is the principal investigator responsible for the "Fiction and the Cultural Mediation of Ageing" project which forms part of the “New Dynamics of Ageing“ initiative.

Kathleen Woodward

Kathleen Woodward is Director of the Simpson Center for the Humanities and Professor of English at the University of Washington, Seattle, US, and Chair of the National Advisory Board of Imagining America. Woodward holds a BA in Economics from Smith College, Northampton, US and a PhD in Literature from the University of California at San Diego, US. She is the author of Statistical Panic: Cultural Politics and Poetics of Emotions (2009) and Aging and Its Discontents: Freud and Other Fictions (1991). She has published essays in the broad cross-disciplinary domains of the emotions, women and aging, and technology and culture in American Literary History, Discourse, Differences, Generations, Indiana Law Journal, SubStance, Journal of Women’s History, Women’s Review of Books, South Atlantic Review, Studies in the Novel, and Cultural Critique.