An invited guest lecture at the meeting of the Versus Arthritis Musculoskeletal Disorders Research Advisory Group, reflecting on arthritis as compared to dementia in cultural discourse, including representations in literary texts and focus in scientific and medical writing.
Ageing, Dementia, Care
A talk at the Cambridge Centre for Science and Policy on how a different perspective on ageing may inform care policy. Read here a summary of the seminar.
From a ‘care-free’ distance?
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.
A conversation on ageing
…together with Sridhar Venkatapuram (Global Health Institute, King’s College London), in a series of cross-college seminars hosted by the Centre for Humanities and Health, King’s College London.
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.
Foucault for Physicists
An invited seminar on ‘Discipline and Power in Cross-Faculty Teaching’, including reflections on the module Science in Context, which I had developed at the Institute for Advanced Teaching and Learning (IATL), when working at the University of Warwick.
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.
Martina Zimmermann 