Critical Humanities and Ageing

Marlene Goldman is a Professor in the Department of English at the University of Toronto who specializes in Canadian literature, age studies, and medical humanities. In addition to her scholarly works, she has also written, directed, and produced a short film about dementia entitled Piano Lessons based on Alice Munro's short story In Sight of the Lake from her collection Dear Life (2004). Her film Torching the Dusties, about ageing and intergenerational warfare from Margaret Atwood's recent collection Stone Mattress (2014), premiered at the Fright Festival in London, U.K. Kate de Medeiros is the O'Toole Family Professor of Gerontology in the Department of Sociology and Gerontology and a Scripps Research Fellow at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio. Dr. de Medeiros's research is broadly focused on understanding the experience of later life using narratives and other qualitative and mix-methods approaches. Research topics include storying later life, the meaning of home, suffering in old age, generativity, moral development in later life, and friendships and social connectivity among people living with dementia.Thomas R. Cole is the McGovern Chair and Director of the McGovern Center for Humanities and Ethics at University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston. His work has been featured in The New York Times, NPR, and PBS. Cole has served as an advisor to the President's Council on Bioethics and the United Nations NGO Committee on Ageing. His book The Journey of Life: A Cultural History of Aging in America was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.