AAGE is a 501c3 registered nonprofit organization operating under AAGE bylaws.

Presidents are elected every two years, and serve one year as President-Elect, two years in office, and one year as Immediate Past President. The official transfer traditionally takes place at the annual business meeting at the meeting of the American Anthropological Association or the Gerontological Society of America (November). Scroll down to see a list of all Past Presidents of AAGE.

Current Board Members

President (2019-20)

Janelle Taylor

Janelle Taylor is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto, where she teaches medical anthropology. She is a member of the Society for Medical Anthropology, Society for Social Studies of Science (4S), and the American Association of University Professors. Janelle’s publications include The Public Life of the Fetal Sonogram: Technology Consumption, and the Politics of Reproduction (Rutgers University Press) and Consuming Motherhood (Rutgers Univ Press). She is recipient of an R21 grant from the NIA titled, “Health Outcomes for Patients with Dementia without Family Caregivers.”

Immediate Past-President

Jason Danely

Jason Danely is a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Oxford Brookes University. He completed his PhD at the University of California, San Diego in 2008, after which he was awarded a Postdoctoral Fellowship from The Center on Age and Community (University of Wisconsin Milwaukee). He is author of Aging and Loss: Mourning and Maturity in Contemporary Japan (Rutgers University Press 2014), and editor of Transitions and Transformations: Cultural Perspectives on Aging and the Life Course (Berghahn 2013). His research expertise relates to aging and care in Japan, where he has at various times taught, studied, performed theater, traveled, meditated and raised children, over the last twenty years. Currently he is conducting research on older adult ex-offender re-entry and resettlement in urban Japan and England/Wales.

Treasurer

Jean Schensul

Dr. Jean Schensul is founder (1987-2004) and currently senior scientist full time, at The Institute for Community Research, an independent research institute conducting prevention research in communities in the United States, India and China, and based in Hartford, CT. She is a medical anthropologist with three decades of experience in the conduct of HIV prevention and other health-related research in urban areas of the United States and in developing countries. Her publications include The Ethnographer’s Toolkit 2^nd Ed. (Rowman and Littlefield 2016) and “Methods in Applied Anthropology” (Trotter, Schensul, and Kostick) in the Handbook of Methods in Cultural Anthropology (Bernard and Gravlee, Eds. Rowman and Littlefield 2014).  Dr. Schensul is, past president of the Society for Applied Anthropology and the Council on Educational Anthropology, an organizational member of the American Anthropological Association, as well as other elected and appointed positions in the American Anthropological Association.

Secretary (2017-2020)

Aaron Seaman

Aaron is currently an Associate of Internal Medicine, Carver College of Medicine, University of Iowa. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago’s Department of Comparative Human Development and his MA in health communication from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Aaron’s research focuses sits at the intersection of health and medicine, kinship, and aging, as he seeks to understand the ways that ideas of health, illness, and social relations shape how people care for each other across their lives. In addition to his work with AAGE, he is part of the editorial collaborative for Somatosphere (somatosphere.net), where he also was the In the Journals editor for six years.

 Anthropology and Aging, Editor-in-Chief

Cortney Hughes-Rinker

I am Associate Professor in Anthropology at George Mason University. I earned my Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California, Irvine with emphases in Feminist Studies and Medicine, Science, and Technology Studies. My teaching and research interests are in medical anthropology, Islam, aging and end-of-life care, public policy, reproduction, Middle East Studies, development, science and technology, and applied anthropology.  My current book project examines the diverse experiences of Muslim patients and families in the Washington, D.C. area as they interact with the health care system during serious illness and end-of-life care. In the book, I use “actively dying” as a theoretical concept to frame the dying body as a main site through which religiosity and religious identities are formed, changed, or contested. Instead of starting from the premise that identities and beliefs are created when living I use the deteriorating and even dead body as the basis to explore religious beliefs and identities. My next long-term ethnographic project focuses on palliative care and pain management during serious illness and end-of-life care in Morocco. A core component of the research is analyzing the use of pain medication (particularly opioids) within the political and economic contexts of Morocco and investigating the bureaucratization of palliative care in the country. I examine how the state impacts the ways people suffer an experience illness and death. I regularly teach the introduction to cultural anthropology along with the undergraduate and graduate seminars in anthropological theory. I also teach specialized courses on medical anthropology, policy and culture, globalization, religion, ethnographic methods and research design, and the Middle East and North Africa.

Student member liason

Celeste Pang

Celeste is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto, with collaborative specializations in Sexual Diversity Studies and Aging and the Life Course. Her doctoral research explores aging, disability, and relations of care among queer and trans older adults residing in long-term care homes and in the community in a Canadian city. She has also contributed to a range of projects in the realms of health and aging, including research on retirement transitions, palliative care, and end of life care planning.

Membership Coordinator

Cristina Douglas

Cristina holds a PhD from  is a PhD candidate in Social Anthropology at University of Aberdeen (UK).  Her research project explores the way personhood emerges in dementia and animals through animal-assisted therapy provided in care homes. Cristina’s previous research projects included topics in the anthropology of death and dying, end-of-life and palliative care.

Past Presidents of AAGE

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