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 (2021-2022)

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 (2020-2022)

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 (2013-2025)

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, Co-Editor-in-Chiefs

Amy Clotworthy

Amy holds a Ph.D. in ethnology and a Master’s degree in applied cultural analysis, both from the University of Copenhagen. In her current position as assistant professor at the Department of Public Health and the interdisciplinary Center for Healthy Aging (CEHA), she teaches and conducts research on how health and social policies targeting older people influence the sociocultural dynamics of later life. With an emphasis on everyday health practices, her research also investigates how the Danish healthcare sector, hospitals, and municipal authorities can improve professional practices by recognising the complexity of older people’s life histories as well as the individual needs and priorities they express in their personal narratives.

Tannistha Samanta

Tannistha is currently an Associate Professor with the Department of Sociology at FLAME University, Pune, India. She received her Masters and PhD from the Department of Sociology, University of Maryland, College Park.  Broadly, her research lies at the interdisciplinary crossroads of family sociology and gerontology where she focuses on living arrangements, social capital & health, older adult sexualities and theory development in aging studies. In another line of inquiry, she is interested in examining the complex nexus of motherhood, sexual politics and the biomedical markets. Her work on aging has been funded by research grants from the United Nations Population Fund, Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR), Centre for Gender Equity & Health (University of San Diego), Population Foundation of India and very recently, the University of Haifa (Israel).

Student Member Liaison

Brooke Jespersen

Brooke is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Case Western Reserve University, specializing in the study of aging and migration. Her dissertation research examines how im/mobility regimes—or power structures enabling, promoting, and restricting migration—relate to older Puerto Rican adults’ conceptualizations, pursuits, and experiences of “good” lives in old age. Brooke’s previous work broadly examines inequality throughout the life course. She has published on intergenerational relationships, child well-being, and child maltreatment.

Past Presidents of AAGE 1979-2020

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