Dr Siân Adiseshiah (University of Loughborough) joins us to deliver a talk on narratives of gendered old age and the ways in which the figure of the ageing woman appears as a blockage in the flow of futurity.
Siân Adiseshiah joined Loughborough University as Senior Lecturer in English and Drama in June 2018 as part of its Excellence 100 campaign, and was promoted to Reader in December 2020. She previously worked at the University of Lincoln (2004-2018), and has taught at the Open University and the University of Birmingham. Her PhD (on the plays of playwright Caryl Churchill) was funded by the AHRC, undertaken at the University of Birmingham, and awarded in 2003. Her research interests lie mostly in contemporary theatre and 21C literary studies, utopianism, class studies, feminist theatre, and age studies.
In recent years she has worked on ageing, especially old age, and theatre. She recently published a chapter called ‘Ageing as Crisis on the Twenty-First Century British Stage’, in Clare Wallace, Clara Escoda, Enric Monforte, and José Ramón Prado-Pérez (eds) Crisis, Representation and Resilience: Perspectives on Contemporary British Theatre (Methuen Bloomsbury, 2022), and a journal article ‘The Utopian Potential of Aging and Longevity in Bernard Shaw’s Back to Methuselah’, Age, Culture, Humanities: An Interdisciplinary Journal (May 2019). In her current work on ageing, Siân is exploring encounters between dominant framings of the contemporary and ageing/old age (particularly female old age) in 21st-century theatre, film, and fiction.