Members-at-Large
Benjamin Gillepsie, Santa Clara University
Benjamin Gillespie is currently Chair of NANAS and Assistant Professor of Theatre History & Performance Studies at Santa Clara University. His essays have appeared in a range of scholarly journals including Theatre Journal, Modern Drama, Theatre Survey, Theatre Topics, and on HowlRound. He is Co-Editor of the Journal of American Drama and Theatre (JADT) and Performance Review Editor of Theatre Journal. Benjamin has contributed numerous chapters to scholarly volumes on queer and feminist theatre and intersections with aging. He is editor of Split Britches: Fifty Years On (University of Michigan Press, 2027) and co-editor of Late Stage: Theatrical Perspectives on Age and Aging (University of Michigan Press, 2026) and The Routledge Companion to LGBTQ+ Theatre and Performance in North America (Routledge, 2027).
Gustavo Morelos Padilla, CETYS Universidad
Gustavo Morelos Padilla is currently Vice Chair of NANAS and is responsible for the monthly NANAS Newsletter. He has a Doctor of Social Science with a background in Psychology and currently works as a Researcher and Lecturer in the field of Social Gerontology. His interests explore the convergence of objective elements and subjective experiences related to old age, with a particular emphasis on promoting aging as a positive experience. Currently, his research concentrates on the topics of work and retirement. Since 2018, Gustavo has held a full-time faculty position at CETYS Universidad Tijuana, where he is affiliated with the graduate program of Social Gerontology. In 2023, he was recognized as a member of the National System of Researchers in Mexico.
Amanda Bull, McMaster University
Amanda Bull is currently Secretary of NANAS. She is a PhD student in Social Gerontology at McMaster University where her program of research broadly examines the lived experiences of aging, ageism, and paid work in Canada. Her SSHRC and OGS funded graduate research aims to privilege older workers’ imaginings of future workplace anti-ageism policy and practice. She holds an HBA from the University of Toronto and an MA in Health and Aging from McMaster University.
Corinne Field, University of Virginia
Corinne Field is an Associate Professor and Associate Chair of Women, Gender & Sexuality at the University of Virginia. Her current book project, “Feminist Aging in Nineteenth-Century America: Old Age, Justice, and Power,” traces the intellectual history of radical women who fought for old age empowerment and justice in the nineteenth century. With David Troyansky, she is co-editing the nineteenth-century volume of Bloomsbury’s “Cultural History of Old Age” (forthcoming). Field is the author of The Struggle for Equal Adulthood: Gender, Race, Age, and the Fight for Citizenship in Antebellum America (University of North Carolina Press, 2014). She is the co-editor with LaKisha Michelle Simmons of The Global History of Black Girlhood (forthcoming from University of Illinois Press, September 2022). With Nicholas Syrett, she co-edited Age in America: Colonial Era to the Present (New York University Press, 2015) and a roundtable for the American Historical Review on “Age as a Useful Category of Historical Analysis.”
Saskia Fürst, University of the Bahamas
Saskia Fürst is Assistant Professor in the School of English Studies at the University of The Bahamas. Her main research area focuses on Aging Studies, particularly representations of older Black women in literature and print advertisements in the US. She also looks at Black diaspora representations in literature and films and have integrated young adult literature and Afrofuturism into my areas of interest. Her work has been recently published in the Bloomsbury Handbook to Ageing in Contemporary Literature and Film (2023) and The Palgrave Handbook of Literature and Aging (2024). She has also co-edited two volumes: U.S. American Expressions of Utopian and Dystopian Visions (2017) and Contemporary Quality TV: the Auteur, the Fans and Constructions of Gender (2021).
Kelsey Harvey, Cape Breton University
Kelsey Harvey is an Assistant Professor of Experiential Studies in Community and Sport at Cape Breton University. A social gerontologist by training, her research is at the intersection of physical activity, community, and education in later life. Her current and past projects include research on interprofessional health and social service education in Canada, learning in and about nature through plogging/walking while picking up litter, and group fitness instructors as community educators in senior’s exercise. She uses community-based and participatory methods to ground her research in the lived experiences and daily realities of older people.
Katie Jacques, University of Kassel
Katie Jacques is a PhD candidate writing a U.S. cultural history of age from the Civil War to the Civil Rights Era at the University of Kassel, Germany, where she joined the History Department as a research associate in a German Research Foundation (DFG)-funded project on age and embodiment. Her forthcoming paper “Reading Age(ing) in Cultural Archetypes: Nineteenth-Century Santa Claus’ New Ideal of Old Age” will appear in the edited collection Cultures of Aging in Transnational American Studies published by transcript. She is currently adapting her dissertation into a monograph. Jacques also co-leads the European Network in Aging Studies (ENAS) Graduate Panel to support and connect emerging scholars in the field of age studies.
Heunjung Lee, University of Calgary
Heunjung Lee is a postdoctoral researcher contributing to research projects at the University of Calgary and University of Alberta. Her articles and reviews have been published in Contemporary Theatre Review, Theatre Research in Canada, Performance Research, the European Journal of Theatre and Performance, and a number of scholarly anthologies.
June Oh, University of Texas
June Oh is an Assistant Professor of English and Digital Studies at The University of Texas at Tyler. Oh’s first research project traces the history of aging in British literature with a special interest in how age intersects with race, gender, and class. As an international teacher and a digital humanities scholar, Oh is currently working on a project that examines the cultural history of aging in the East Asian digital landscape. Her work has been published in Age Culture Humanities, The Korean Society of British and American Fiction, and Studies in Modern British and American Poetry.
Student Representative
Amanda Bull, McMaster University
Amanda Bull is a PhD student in Social Gerontology at McMaster University where her program of research broadly examines the lived experiences of aging, ageism, and paid work in Canada. Her SSHRC and OGS funded graduate research aims to privilege older workers’ imaginings of future workplace anti-ageism policy and practice. She holds an HBA from the University of Toronto and an MA in Health and Aging from McMaster University. She is also Secretary of NANAS.
Treasurer
Valerie Lipscomb, University of South Florida
Valerie Lipscomb is Professor and Associate Chair of English at USF Sarasota-Manatee, where she teaches American and modern British literature. In 2016 Palgrave Macmillan published her book, Performing Age in Modern Drama, the first monograph to examine age and aging as performance in contemporary plays. Her co-edited collection of essays, Staging Age: The Performance of Age in Theatre, Dance, and Film, also was published by Palgrave. Dr. Lipscomb’s articles on age and drama have appeared in such journals as Modern Drama, the International Journal of Ageing and Later Life, and Age, Culture, Humanities. She has chaired the Executive Committee of the Modern Language Association (MLA) Age Studies Forum and regularly presents at international and national conferences on literature, theatre, and age studies.
Institutional Member
Sally Chivers, Trent University
Sally Chivers is Full Professor of Gender & Social Justice and English at Trent University (Canada), where she is also a Founding Executive Member and Past Director of the Trent Centre for Aging & Society. Along with dozens of articles and book chapters, she is the author of two monographs: on aging in women’s writing (From Old Woman to Older Women) and another on the relationship between aging and disability as depicted in cinema (The Silvering Screen) and two co-edited volumes: one on disability in cinema (Film and the Problem Body) and another on nursing home narratives. She was honoured by her university with the 2021 Distinguished Research Award in recognition of her prolific scholarship and international reputation as a leader in the interdisciplinary fields of age and disability studies, health humanities, and cultural gerontology. She hosts the scholarly podcast Wrinkle Radio.
European Network in Aging Studies (ENAS) Representative
Linda Hess, University of Augsburg
Linda Hess is a senior lecturer and postdoctoral researcher in American Studies at the University of Augsburg, Germany. She is author of Queer Aging in North American Fiction (2019) and co-editor of Life Writing in the Posthuman Anthropocene (2021). She contributed articles to Critical Humanities and Ageing: Forging Interdisciplinary Dialogues (2022) and a Special Issue on Ageism of the University of Toronto Quarterly (2021). She is also currently the Deputy Chair of ENAS. Next to her work in age studies, her current research and teaching interests include questions of grievability in the environmental humanities and the intersection of ecocriticism and humor studies.
Ex Officio Member Representing the Journal Age, Culture, Humanities
Aagje Swinnen, Maastricht University
Aagje Swinnen is a full professor in Aging Studies at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, where she also chairs the Department of Literature and Art. She is originally trained as a literary scholar (obtained her PhD at Ghent University, Belgium, in 2004) and has grown her areas of expertise in the last twenty years into the fields of critical age(ing) and dementia studies. Swinnen serves on the Academic Advisory Board of the NANAS sister organization, the European Network in Aging Studies (ENAS).
