Please save the date for The Lifespan: Perspectives on Ageing and the Life Course from the Medical Humanities, the Health Sciences and Age Studies, the 2025 Conference of SLSAeu European Society for Literature, Science and the Arts, hosted by The Sciences of Ageing and the Culture of Youth. The event will be led by Dr Aura Heydenreich (President SLSAeu) and Dr Martina Zimmermann (SAACY Programme Lead).

Ageing is too often seen as an inevitable period of decline at the end of our lives. The UKRI-funded research programme The Sciences of Ageing and the Culture of Youth (SAACY), based at the Centre for the Humanities and Health at King’s College London, looks at how we can overcome this cultural pessimism by understanding ageing as a lifelong process of change. SAACY explores how we talk and think about ageing in scientific research, medical practice and wider culture, and how the way we do so can affect our experiences of ageing, the meaning we assign to growing older, and the decisions we make about older people.

This three-day conference will be held at King’s College London. We hope to provide limited hybrid options with a strong preference for papers to be presented in person. We are keen to foster conversations across disciplines within individual panels, encouraging contributions on lifespan/lifecourse approaches to ageing from disciplines such as Anthropology, Cultural Studies, Dementia Studies, Disability Studies, Epidemiology, Evolutionary Science and Medicine, Gender Studies, Geriatrics, Gerontology, Health Economics, Languages and Literatures, Narrative Medicine, Neuroscience, Philosophy, Postgenomic Sciences, Psychiatry, and Public Health.

The Call for Papers and further information on fees and bursaries will be circulated soon.

Confirmed plenary speakers and round table discussants include:

Sally Chivers, Trent University, Canada

Ulrike Draesner, Leipzig University, Germany

Des O’Neill, Trinity College Dublin, Republic of Ireland

Susan Pickard, University of Liverpool, UK

Oliver Robinson, Imperial College London, UK

Kavita Sivaramakrishnan, Columbia University, USA

Aagje Swinnen, Maastricht University, Netherlands