Representing Aging: Literature, Film, and the Demographic Shift

Jennifer Kellett is a PhD student in Comparative Literature at Indiana University. Prior to IU, Jennifer received her MA in French Literature at Florida State University, where she also received her BA in Theatre Studies and French. She worked professionally in the theatre industry, including at Imagination Stage, Florida Repertory Theatre, Stages St. Louis, and several summer festivals. She also taught in France for the TAPIF program, before returning to her post-graduate education.

Agustín Zarzosa is Associate Professor and Chair of Cinema Studies at SUNY Purchase. He is the author of Refiguring Melodrama in Film and Television (Lexington Books) and the forthcoming The Sordid Image: The Naturalist Cinema of Arturo Ripstein and Paz Alicia Garciadiego (Northwestern University Press). His essays on melodrama and film theory have appeared in journals such as New Review of Film and Television, World Picture, Cinema, Angelaki, and Discourse. 

Associate Professor of Iberian and Latin American Cultures at Stanford University. Author of Monsters by Trade, The Stages of Property and La Bisabuelita as well as numerous articles on modern Spanish and Cuban literature and culture. 

I am Marjan Heidari. I am doing my PhD in literature at the University of Texas at Dallas. As a teaching associate, I teach rhetoric to UTD undergraduates. I am interested in comparative literature, feminism, postcolonial literature, and psychoanalysis. 

Yusi Chang is a PhD candidate in Cultural Studies at Trent University. She holds a Bachelor's degree in Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language and a Master's degree in Film Studies, both from Nanjing University. Her current research explores the intersections of aging and film, particularly how Chinese cinematic narratives of aging engage with the spiritual quest for meaning. Her broader interests include critical and humanistic aging studies, self-help culture, and the films of Charlie Kaufman.

Dr. Debashrita Dey is an Assistant Professor of English in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at Indian Institute of Technology (Indian School of Mines), Dhanbad, India. Her research interests encompass Feminist Ageing Studies, Health Humanities, and Care Narratives. Her work has been published in journals, including the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, National Identities, South Asian Popular Culture and the International Journal of Human Rights in Healthcare, among others. 

Yingzhi Lu is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is working on a dissertation project on representations of aging in contemporary Japanese literature, with a focus on metamorphoses of metaphorical imaginations about aging in their socio-cultural and gendered context. Her other theoretical interests lie in the intersections of disability studies, health humanities, and affect theories. 

Tesfaye Mesele Zinabu (PhD) is an Associate Professor of English Language and Literature at Mekelle University. He has his Ph.D. from Addis Ababa University, and his research area includes gender, social values, social conscience, children, aging, justice, family, and inclusiveness. Currently, he is serving as Editor-in-Chief for ITYOPIS: Northeast African Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities at Mekelle University.

Emanuela Tchitchova is a French language assistant professor. Her PhD in comparative literature focuses on autofictional works of authors of the French Nouveau roman and Bulgarian contemporary novels, aiming to fictionalise the harrowing realities of transition and emigration. Her interests in literature aim to link literature and society, history and general literary movements ideas. Her specialised focus is autobiographical and autofictional writing.

Miyo Inoue is an independent scholar based in San Francisco Bay Area. Her research interests include documentary films (especially focusing on the ethics of representation), Japanese cinema and literature.

Aarón Lacayo is Associate Professor of Spanish at Gettysburg College. His book project, Unaccompanied Cinema: Ecologies of Violence in Contemporary Central American Film, examines the intersections of ecology, politics and violence in postwar Central American cinema. His essays on Latin American cinema and culture have appeared in journals and edited collections such as Comparative Literature Studies, Teaching Central American Literature in a Global Context and Ecocinema Theory & Practice 2.