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PEOPLE
Meet the Team
Meet the international team of project participants who are collaborating on [ Framing Ageing ].
Project Organisers
Anne Fuchs (MRIA, FBA) is Professor and Director of the UCD Humanities Institute. Prior to her current post she was Professor of German Studies at the University of Warwick, Professor and Chair of German at the University of St Andrews and Professor of Modern German Literature and Culture at University College Dublin. She has made a major contribution to the humanities through her publications (6 monographs, 12 co-edited volumes/special issues and over 80 single-author articles/book chapters) and research leadership, spanning significant grant capture, the organisation of many international and interdisciplianry conferences and workshops; regular keynotes/invited lectures; PhD and postdoc supervision, service on editorial boards, and her membership of the The Royal Irish Academy and her fellowship of The British Academy.
Desmond O’Neill is Professor of Medical Gerontology at Trinity College Dublin. His research centres on gerontology and the neurosciences, with a strong emphasis on the humanities. He is a co-founder and past-president of the European Union Geriatric Medicine Society (www.eugms.org), and currently the Chair of the Humanities and Arts Committee of the Gerontological Society of America and co-chair of Medical and Health Humanities at TCD. He was awarded the All-Ireland Inspirational Life Award in 2010 for advancing the cause of older people in Ireland.
Mary Cosgrove is Professor in German and Humanities at Trinity College Dublin. She is also Co-Chair, with Desmond O’Neill, of the Medical and Health Humanities research network). Research interests include cultural memory, trauma, melancholy and depression.
Julia Langbein (Co-organiser)
Julia Langbein is Research Fellow in Trinity College Dublin. She is an art historian specialising in the nineteenth-century popular visual culture. She received her PhD in 2014 from the University of Chicago, held a postdoctoral research fellowship at Oxford University 2014-2018, and is now a Research Fellow at Trinity College, Dublin. She is the author of Laugh Lines: Caricature and Painting in Nineteenth-Century France (Bloomsbury, 2021), the first major study of the public mockery of fine art, and is now working on a monograph entitled Ageing in the Age of Modernism, which re-examines developments in pictorial modernism in the context of nineteenth-century fears about population ageing.
UCD, TCD, Age & Opportunity Workshop Participants
Tara Byrne
Tara is the Arts Programme Manager at Age & Opportunity, Ireland’s national organization that promotes positive attitudes to ageing, as well as Festival Director of Bealtaine, Ireland’s national festival celebrating the arts and creativity as we age. Over the past twenty five years, she has built a strong reputation as an arts manager, curator and director, working as Director of the National Sculpture Factory in Cork from 2002- 2008, the Arts Council of Ireland (1996 – 2002), the Irish Museum of Modern Art (1992 – 1994), the National College of Art and Design (1991 – 1995), and many other arts organisations. More recently since completing a doctorate in Cultural Policy at the Graduate School of Creative Arts and Media at Dublin Institute of Technology (2013), she has acted as an independent arts and cultural researcher, policy consultant, teacher and advocate, for both the arts, public service and university sectors.
Desmond J. Tobin
Desmond J. Tobin is Professor of Dermatological Science at UCD. He has researched in basic and applied skin and hair sciences, with a particular focus on the regulation of hair growth in health and disease. He has also explored how skin and hair function (incl. impacts on appearance) changes with age, due both to chronologic (intrinsic) and behavioural (incl. extrinsic) drivers.
Naonori Kodate is Assistant Professor in the UCD School of Social Policy, Social Work and Social Justice. He is currently the Principal Investigator of a two-year, Toyota Foundation-funded international research project “Harmonisation towards the establishment of Person-centred, Roboticsaided Care System (HARP: RoCS)”, working with teams in Ireland, Japan, Hong Kong and France. Another research project he leads is “Comparative analysis of patient safety systems: from the perspective of life cycle of incident data” funded by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.
Gillian Pye is Associate Professor in the UCD School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics. She works on narratives of happiness in contemporary literature from an interdisciplinary perspective, straddling narratology, psychology, and sociology.
João Guimarães is an IRC funded postdoctoral fellow at UCD Humanities Institute. His project, “The Old Garde”, investigates how experimental American poets challenge the notion that vanguardism is a caprice of youth and the idea that old age is a time of recapitulation, reconciliation and resignation. In May 2020, João will host a symposium at UCD titled “Ageing Experiments: Futures and Fantasies of Old Age”, which will center on representations of ageing in science-fiction, fantasy and experimental art. Finally, he will contribute an essay about ageing in Portuguese cinema to a collection organized by Raquel Medina and an essay about dementia and experimental poetry to a collection organized by Heike Hartung.
Virpi Timonen is Professor of Social Work & Social Policy at TCD. Her work focuses on the sociology of ageing and social policies as they are unfolding in ageing societies. She has published over 100 peer-reviewed articles, books and chapters on sociology and social politics of the human life course from youth to old age, including widely-cited contributions to understanding later lives in the context of intergenerational relations within families and societies. Her work on care policies illuminates the ways in which public, private and informal actors’ involvement in the care of older people is evolving in ageing societies. In 2014-2018, Professor Timonen served as the elected President of the Research Committee on the Sociology of Ageing (RC11) of the International Sociological Association (ISA), the largest global scholarly community of social gerontologists.
Other National and International Participants
Shaun O’Keeffe
Shaun O’Keeffe is Honorary Professor of Medicine at NUIG. He is a geriatrician whose research in the areas of ethics in later life, delirium and restless legs syndrome has received international acclaim.
Kieran Walsh
Kieran Walsh is Professor of Ageing and Public Policy and Director of the Irish Centre for Social Gerontology at NUI Galway. Since joining the ICSG in 2006, Kieran has worked primarily in the areas of environmental gerontology and infrastructures of care. This has included studies on older adult community and voluntary activity, the impact of assistive technology on the lives of older people and the interaction between elements of place (particularly in rural areas), technology and community.
Gemma Carney
Gemma Carney is a critical gerontologist based at the School of Social Sciences, Education and Social Work at Queen’s University Belfast. She was PI on The Lively Project https://thelivelyproject.wordpress.com/about/, a Wellcome Trust funded project (with historian Leonie Hannan and visual artist, Gemma Hodge). Her book, Critical Questions for Ageing Societies (with Paul Nash, Leonard Davis School of Gerontology, University of Southern California) will be published by Policy Press in September 2020. She is currently Co-Investigator on an Arts, Humanities Research Council grant called Dementia in the Minds of Characters and Readers, led by Jane Lugea, School of Arts, English and Languages, QUB. She serves on the Executive Committee of the British Society of Gerontology and the editorial board of Ageing & Society.
Hilary Moss
Hilary Moss is Senior Lecturer in Music Therapy at the World Academy of Music and Dance in University of Limerick, and until recently the Director of the National Centre for Arts and Health, Tallaght Hospital, Dublin. She completed her PhD in 2014 on aesthetic deprivation and the role of the arts for older people in hospital at Trinity College Dublin School of Medicine. She is a Musician and Music Therapist and has an MBA in Health Service Management. Her research interests include music therapy in mental health and older age, arts therapies, arts and health, medical/health humanities, receptive music in healthcare settings, singing and health and the aesthetic environment of hospital.
David G Troyansky
David Troyansky is Professor of History at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. He is author of Aging in World History (2015) and co-editor of the 6 volume A Cultural History of Old Age which will be published by Bloomsbury in the coming decade.
Robert Zwijnenberg
Robert Zwijnenberg is Professor of Art and Science Interactions, Leiden University, Holland. His research focuses on the role of contemporary art in the academic and public debates on the ethical, societal, political, legal and cultural implications of biotechnological innovations. He specifically engages with a growing number of artists, known as bio artists, who use the opportunities offered by the life sciences to work with new materials: living materials that traditionally do not belong to the artistic realm. The use of these living materials, or moist media, in artistic practice also implies the application of the tools of the life sciences in the arts.
Aleida Assmann
Aleida Assmann is Emeritus Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Konstanz, Germany. She is a seminal figure in the field of cultural memory studies. Her many books and articles on cultural memory, memory and forgetting/ frames of memory etc have been translated into 20 languages. She is the recipient of major prizes and awards, including the Heineken Prize for History in 2014, the Karl-Jaspers Prize by the Universität Heidelberg, the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the city of Heidelberg in 2017 (with Jan Assmann), the Balzan Prize in 2017 (with Jan Assmann) and the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels in 2018.
Ulla Kriebernegg
Ulla Kriebernegg is Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Graz, head of the “Age and Care Research Group Graz”, and adjunct at the Medical University Graz, Austria. She studied English & American Studies and German at the University of Graz and at University College Dublin, Ireland. Her latest book, Putting Age in its Place (forthcoming, Heidelberg), focuses on cultural representations of care homes in North American film and fiction. Ulla’s emphasis in research and teaching is on age/ageing studies, literary gerontology, and medical humanities. She is project director of “Who Cares: Alter(n) und Pflege gemeinsam neu denken” and deputy chair of the European Network of Aging Studies (ENAS) of which she is also a founding member. She co-edits the Aging Studies book series and is an editorial board member of several journals such as The Gerontologist and the Journal in Aging Studies. She won several research and teaching awards. In 2017, she was awarded the Inaugural Stephen Katz Distinguished Visiting Fellowship of Trent University, Canada.
Rina Knoeff is Associate Professor of History, University of Groningen, Holland. She works on the history of body and health in the Enlightenment with special reference to the influential medicine of the Dutch Boerhaavians. She recently completed a research project on Boerhaave’s chemico- medical legacy and Dutch Enlightenment Culture and is now working on the history of healthy ageing in the eighteenth century.
Dana Walrath
Dana Walrath, a writer, artist and anthropologist, likes to cross borders and disciplines with her work. After years of using stories and art to teach medical students at University of Vermont’s College of Medicine, she spent 2012-2013 as a Fulbright Scholar in Armenia completing Like Water on Stone, her award winning verse novel about the Armenian genocide. Her graphic memoir, Aliceheimer’s about life with her mother, Alice and dementia, was featured in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and on National Public Radio. Passionate about the power of art for social change, her installation View from the High Ground uses interactive artists books to counter dehumanization and genocide. Illustrated essays and commentary have appeared in The Lancet, Irish Times, Slate, Somatosphere, Foreign Policy, and on Public Radio. She has shown her artwork and spoken about the healing power of stories throughout North America and Eurasia including two TEDx talks. A Senior Atlantic Fellow for Equity in Brain Health of the Global Brain Health Institute, Trinity College Dublin | University of California San Francisco, she is currently working on a second Aliceheimer’s book that will blend personal memoir with anthropological discourse on the end of life, stigma, gender, labour flows, and dementia across the globe.
Zainabu Jallo is a PhD student in Bern University, Switzerland. Zainabu is a practice-based ethnographer, artist and playwright and producer of “Some of the People I am”: a digital short story about 6 older women.
Julia Twigg
Julia Twigg’s first degree was in History from the University of Durham, followed by MSc and PhD in Sociology from the London School of Economics. She moved to the University of Kent in 1996, having previously worked at the Universities of York and Hull. Her earlier work stretched across the field of age, embodiment and care, with studies of family care, bathing and the bodywork of care. Recently she has addressed the cultural field of dress, exploring the role of clothing in the constitution of age, with studies of women and men over 55, and of people with dementia. In 2015 she co- edited with Wendy Martin The Routledge Handbook of Cultural Gerontology.
Paul Higgs
Paul Higgs studied for a BSc in Sociology at the Polytechnic of North London and a PhD in Social Policy at the University of Kent. Before he moved to UCL in 1994 he was the Eleanor Peel Lecturer in Social Gerontology at St George’s Hospital Medical School, London. He is currently Professor of the Sociology of Ageing at UCL and was elected a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in 2012 and a fellow of the Gerontological Society of America. He was also a visiting professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Bath (2015-18).
Katie Featherstone
Katie Featherstone’s research programme uses sociology and sociological methods to provide the empirical foundations for new knowledge and theoretical developments to improve the quality and humanity of care that people living with dementia receive in hospital. This work has a strong focus on applying clinically relevant detailed ethnographic research to provide understandings of the cultures, organization and delivery of dementia care in acute wards that identifies the needs of people living with dementia, their carers, and ward staff within the acute hospital setting.
Andrew King
Andrew King is Professor of Sociology at the University of Surrey where he is also Co-Director of the Centre for Research on Ageing and Gender and Co-Chair of SGS (the Sex, Gender and Sexualities Research Group at Surrey). He leads the Norface funded project, ‘CILIA-LGBTQI+’ which is comparing intersectional life course inequalities amongst LGBTQI+ people in four European countries and has been actively researching LGBT+ ageing for over fifteen years. He has published widely in the field, including: Older Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual People: Identities, Intersections, Institutions (Routledge, 2016), Older LGBT People: Minding the Knowledge Gaps (Routledge, 2019), and Intersections of Ageing, Gender and Sexualities (Policy Press, 2019). Andrew is an associate editor of Ageing and Society.
Susan Pickard
Susan Pickard’s research and teaching interests are located within the fields of sociological approaches to ageing, gender, embodiment, health and illness. Her research in these areas has been published in a number of high ranking academic journals supported by a number of grants including from Leverhulme, the Foundation for the Sociology of Health and Illness, AHRC and the British Academy.
Linda Shortt
Born and raised in Dublin, Dr Linda Shortt completed a BA in German and History in 2001 and an MA International in German Cultural and Language Studies in 2003 at UCD. Her PhD in German (Pathologies of Belonging? Generation, Place and Rebellion in Post-Unification German Literature) was completed in 2009 as part of the UCD Humanities Institute’s interdisciplinary research programme on “Memory, Identity and Meaning”. After finishing her PhD, she went to Germany to work as a research assistant for Prof. Aleida Assmann at the Exzellenzkluster at Universität Konstanz. Before coming to Warwick, she worked as Lecturer in German in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at Bangor University (2010-2016).