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

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.

President-Elect (2018)

Janelle Taylor

Janelle Taylor is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Washington, 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.”

Past-President (2017-18)

Iveris Martinez

Iveris Martinez, Past-President (2017-18) is an Associate Professor of Medicine at the Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine at Florida International University. She has over 20 years of experience teaching and conducting research on social and cultural factors influencing health throughout the life course, with an emphasis in aging, immigration, and Latin American populations with funding from the National Institutes of Health, the Macarthur Foundation, and American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) and others. She is the author of numerous articles and chapters in the fields of aging, medical education, and the integration of anthropological knowledge.  Her publications include “Twelve Tips for Teaching Social Determinants of Health in Medicine” (2014) in Medical Teacher, and “Invisible Civic Engagement among older adults: The role of informal volunteering” (2011) in the Journal of Cross-Cultural Gerontology.  She is currently Chair of the Board of the Alliance for Aging, Inc., the area agency on aging for Miami-Dade and Monroe Counties in Florida that provides over $35 million worth of services to 86,000 seniors.

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 Co-Editor

Cortney Hughes-Rinker

Cortney is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at George Mason University, where she is also a member of the steering committee for the Ali Vural Ak Center for Global Islamic Studies and a faculty affiliate of Women and Gender Studies. Her academic interests are in medical anthropology, Islam and biomedicine, health decisions, policy, aging and end-of-life care, pain management, and reproductive health. Cortney conducts ethnographic research in Morocco and Washington, D.C. She is the author of Islam, Development, and Urban Women’s Reproductive Practices (Routledge 2013), co-editor of Applied Anthropology: Unexpected Spaces, Topics, and Methods (Routledge 2016), and has published in journals such as Medical Anthropology Quarterly, the Arab Studies Journal, Medical Anthropology, and the Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion. https://soan.gmu.edu/people/chughe13

 Anthropology and Aging Co-Editor

Philip Kao

Philip has been editor of Anthropology and Aging since 2013. He received his PhD in Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews. He also holds an AB in Economics (Chicago) and an MSc in Social Anthropology and Development (LSE). His doctoral research was concerned with aging, personhood and the practice of caregiving in an American long-term care facility. Additionally, he has conducted fieldwork in Malta and throughout the United States, including an ongoing project investigating the nature of work and inequality among oil and gas workers in the boomtowns of western North Dakota. He is also an alumnus of the Presidential Management Fellows program. Is is currently Lecturer and Assistant Director of Undergraduate Studies at Harvard University.

Student member liason

Megan Alexander

“I discovered AAGE at a time when I was struggling to find my research niche in aging and end-of-life care. My advisor, Mary Alice Scott at New Mexico State University (NMSU), recommended I seek out other scholars on aging to help support my thesis endeavors. By happenstance, I found AAGE in my drive to find support in aging research. Fortunate for me, AAGE was holding one of their fantastic workshop conferences the following year in Miami. I arrived at the meeting unsure of myself, with my first conference paper in hand, and left having found my voice as a scholar. I left that workshop with confidence, a renewed determination, and some of the best feedback I have ever received from founding member Jay Sokolovsky. The various conferences I have since attended, whether AAA or SfAA, as an AAGE member, only strengthened my resolve to continue in aging research. But it is not just the conferences that I have benefitted from, as AAGE continues to produce a stellar peer-reviewed journal, blog posts, news, conference resource lists, and member discussion forums. For an up and coming scholar in aging research, these additional resources help me discover the more substantial body of work on aging that is often overlooked by other journals and interest groups. This group of scholars has been incredibly supportive and encouraging, and I find myself regularly recommending AAGE as a group and the collective research of its members.”

Past Presidents of AAGE

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