The Palgrave Handbook of Literature and Aging

Valerie Barnes Lipscomb is Professor of English at the University of South Florida, USA. She is author of Performing Age in Modern Drama (2016) and lead editor of Staging Age: The Performance of Age in Theatre, Dance, and Film (2010). Lipscomb’s articles on age and drama have appeared in such journals as Modern Drama, the Journal of Aging Studies, the International Journal of Ageing and Later Life, and Age, Culture, Humanities. She also regularly presents papers at international and national conferences on literature, theatre, and age studies. Lipscomb has chaired the Executive Committee of the Modern Language Association Age Studies Forum and is Treasurer of the North American Network in Aging Studies.

Aagje Swinnen is Professor of Aging Studies at Maastricht University, the Netherlands. Her co-edited volumes in English include Interdisciplinarity in the Scholarly Life Cycle; Engaged Humanities; Popularizing Dementia; and Aging, Performance, and Stardom. She has published on representations of age and its intersections with gender, sexuality, and disability in literature, photography, and film; meanings of literary interventions in dementia care; and ways in which professional artists understand creativity in the later stages of their career in journals such as the Journal of Aging Studies, The Gerontologist, Dementia, Ageing & Society, and Feminist Media Studies. Swinnen is co-founder and former chair of the European Network in Aging Studies as well as co-editor of the open access journal Age, Culture, Humanities. She currently serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Aging Studies and Dementia.