Q: How long have you been a GSA member?
A: I have been a member since I started my PhD. My thesis supervisor introduced me to GSA and encouraged me to become a member, which I really appreciated.
Q: Do you have a GSA resource that has been your “go-to” for keeping you engaged with the Society?
A: My most important resources are the humanities section in The Gerontologist, the Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Gerontology Advisory Panel and our events and webinars which I participated in both as attendee and speaker, but also the Mentoring Consultancies/Career Conversations which were always great. I am not a member in the last one any longer, but the people organizing those webinars are doing a stellar job in offering members insights into the professional side of the aging field in research and practice.
Q: In what ways has membership in GSA benefitted you?
A: As a doctoral student, you read all those great researchers’ articles and books in cultural gerontology and aging studies, and quite honestly, sometimes you do not even know how to pronounce their names correctly, they are just the author behind this brilliant research. And then you go to an annual meeting of GSA – a very large conference for someone in the humanities – and get to listen to their talks, ask questions, and connect with the people behind those texts you read. And at some point, years later, you’ll sit at a table chatting with Chris Phillipson, Stephen Katz, Ulla Kriebernegg, and Amanda Grenier, and someone just casually says “is that Toni Calasanti over there who just walked over to the buffet?” and it still feels a bit surreal that you’re all of a sudden sitting at the same table with the researchers you’ve looked up to since you were a student. I think a lot of conferences have that effect on people, but GSA’s annual meetings have always been a great way to meet fantastic scholars in the field of aging. Since I joined GSA, I have been a member of several groups within the organization, the most influential one being the Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Gerontology advisory panel. I have also become a GSA mentor and connected with students internationally. It has been a great experience so far.
Q: How did you get interested in the field of aging?
A: I became a member of the European Network in Aging Studies as an MA student. My dissertation supervisor Ulla Kriebernegg, who is on the GSA’s board of directors, was the network’s president at that time, and when the ENAS/NANAS (North American Network in Aging Studies) was hosted at my alma mater, the University of Graz in Austria, in 2017, I noticed how diverse and interesting the research was that people were engaged with. I also took classes in literary and cultural studies that focused on the narratives and representations of aging and got more and more interested in the field. The research brought a lot of questions and insights to the fore that I experienced in my own life, in interactions with older people, in images of age and aging the media and in literary texts, and in conversations with my own grandparents; especially my grandmother, whose patience for cooking with me as a child sparked my idea for my dissertation project on food and aging in literature. I wanted to explore the value of seemingly trivial things like eating and gathering around the table to our lives.
Q: What do you love most about your line of work?
A: I love that I can be curious and ask questions in the work that I do. But I also love that, as a member of the Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Gerontology Advisory Panel of GSA and the current president of the European Network in Aging Studies (ENAS), I get insight into several different networks in the field of aging and connect with people inside and outside GSA, but also connect people whose research passions align with one another. ENAS just established a speaker series called “ENAS Quarterly: Research in Conversation” at the beginning of last year through which we get a glimpse into how broad the field of aging is just in the humanities and social sciences, how diverse the approaches to age and aging are, and how passionate researchers are about their interests. That and the collaboration that comes out of such events and connections is very enriching. PS: The lectures are open to the public; you can find them on agingstudies.eu.
Q: What projects are you working on in your current position?
A: My research is in literary and cultural studies, I work with representations of age and aging in literature, film, TV, in connection with other cultural texts like policy papers or activist productions, and I am interested in how these images of age and aging are influenced by cultural discourses, and how they shape them in return. I am currently finishing a book project that emerged out of my previous research on the US-Austrian author Lore Segal, who passed away in 2024 at the age of 96. I am fascinated by her musings on aging, and the ways in which she captures everyday life situations in the lives of (older) people without reproducing stereotypes.
I started a new research project a while ago working on the representation of domestic work in contemporary film and literature which is relevant to age studies because it discusses the social and cultural relevance of care up until older ages. With this research, I want to trace how our evaluation of care work has changed in cultural representations and show which cultural narratives have emerged out of these creative texts, how they portray care work, and how they pick up on epistemic trends in research and society.
Q: What was the best piece of advice you got early on in your career you’d like to pass on to emerging gerontologists?
A: To never stop asking good questions even if there is no answer but another question that follows. And that we need to stay curious!