A book chapter on how adult sons perceive of themselves as they confront their parent’s older age and memory loss, reading Michele Farina’s Quando andiamo a casa? (2015), Jonathan Taylor’s Take Me Home (2007) and Nick Taylor’s A Necessary End (1994). In the open access essay collection Ageing Masculinities, Alzheimer’s and Dementia Narratives (London: Bloomsbury, 2022), edited by Heike Hartung, Rüdiger Kunow and Matthew Sweney.
Dementia and the Politics of Memory in Fiction
A book chapter on Alzheimer’s disease and other types of dementia and their deployment in fiction: from narrative experiment to the patient as plot device. In: The Politics of Dementia: Forgetting and Remembering the Violent Past in Literature, Film and Graphic Narratives (Berlin: DeGruyter, 2022 – open access), edited by Irmela Marei Krüger-Fürhoff, Nina Schmidt and Sue Vice.
Interdependent narratives: dementia in science, medicine and literature of the long 20th century
A keynote delivered at Amnesie d’autore: 1920-2020, un secolo di parole per raccontare l’amnesia, an international conference about memory loss at the University of Urbino Carlo Bo, Italy, 23-25 September 2021.
Review of The Diseased Brain and the Failing Mind
Review by Matthew Broome, chair in psychiatry and youth mental health, and director of the Institute for Mental Health, at the University of Birmingham, in Times Higher Education.
Informal Dementia Care: COVID-19, burning glass on the divide between policy and practice
An intervention in the framework of Thinking in Crisis Times, a collective exploration by the KCL English Department, to situate the ongoing care crisis within the wider context of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Diseased Brain and the Failing Mind
My second book is out now: The Diseased Brain and the Failing Mind charts changing cultural understandings of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease in scientific and cultural texts across the 20th Century. Reading a range of texts from the US, UK, Europe and Japan, the book examines how the language of dementia – regarding the loss of identity, loss of agency, loss of self and life – is rooted in scientific discourse and expressed in popular and literary texts. Following changing scientific understandings of dementia, the book also demonstrates how cultural expressions of the experience and dementia have fed back into the way medical institutions have treated dementia patients.
Joining King’s College London
as Lecturer in Health Humanities and Health Sciences.
UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship awarded
The research undertaken with this UKRI FLF award evolves at the boundaries of literary analysis, medical sciences and empirical research, to explore two questions: how does scientific research influence how we think about ageing, and how does culture frame scientific research on ageing and diseases of old age.
Tools of Care
Giving a presentation on the ‘Tools of Care in the Dementia Detective Novel’ at the Ageing, Illness, Care in Cultural and Literary Narrative conference at the University of Huddersfield, September 5-6, 2019.
Conversations on Care and/in the Community
Delighted to have contributed to conversations on Care and/in the Community at Birkbeck in June 2019. For Leah Sidi’s account of the workshop surrounding twenty-first century social and spatial conditions of care, see her post on The Polyphony.
Martina Zimmermann 