International Health Humanities Network Membership

I am Reader in English and Drama at Loughborough University. I lead a new research group - Health Humanities - which is based in the English at Loughborough University. In recent years I have worked on ageing, especially old age and theatre. A recent article in this area is ‘The Utopian Potential of Aging and Longevity in Bernard Shaw’s Back to Methuselah’, Age, Culture, Humanities: An Interdisciplinary Journal (May 2019), and I have a chapter called ‘Ageing as Crisis on the Twenty-First Century British Stage’ due to be published shortly in Clare Wallace, Clara Escoda, and José Ramón Prado-Pérez (eds) Performing Crisis: Perspectives on Contemporary British Theatre (Methuen Bloomsbury, 2022). In my current work on ageing, I am exploring encounters between dominant framings of the contemporary and ageing/old age (particularly female old age) in 21stst-century theatre, film, and fiction.

I was also Principal Convenor of the British Academy conference - 'Narratives of Old Age and Gender' - which took place in London in September 2019, and was co-run with colleagues from the Universities of Lincoln and Keele. Taking a broad historical perspective from the early modern period to the present, the conference put past and present into dialogue and addressed representations of both ageing masculinity and femininity, asking how gendered cultural narratives can be crucial for gerontological debates and how studies of gender are enriched by attending to old age. The conference brought together scholars from multiple disciplines, creative practitioners, and experts on ageing from third sector organizations to consider narratives of old age and gender, their limitations and the potential for alternatives. More details can be found online. I am currently co-editing a supplementary issue of the Journal of the British Academy based on research presented at the conference.