People

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.”

President-Elect (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.

Secretary (2020-23)

Fayana Richards

Fayana is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Memphis. My research agenda seeks to understand how older adults’ experiences of aging, health and wellbeing are shaped by dynamics produced within interpersonal relations and socio-political processes in the U.S. Specifically, I am interested in how intersections of raced and gendered subjectivities and hierarchies contextualize health inequities for caregiving older Black women and their families.

Treasurer (2013-25)

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.

 Anthropology and Aging, Editor-in-Chief

Henrik Hvenegaard Mikkelsen

Henrik brings extensive and diverse experience in academic publishing to his role at the helm of A&A. In addition to publishing his own work across a range of journals, from The Scientist to American Ethnologist, Henrik has interned for HAU (2010-11) and is currently a member of the advisory board for the Journal of Extreme Anthropology. In 2019 he co-edited a special issue for Anthropology & Aging on Energy and the Danish Welfare State. Henrik’s first monograph, Cutting Cosmos: Masculinity and Spectacular Events among the Bugkalot, was published by Berghahn in 2018.

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 1979-2018

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