Date and time Thursday, September 12 · 6:30 - 8:30pm CEST
Location Online
Event lasts 2 hours
In this talk, Professor James Chappel (Duke University) will discuss the trans-national, and trans-Atlantic, history of aging in the 20th century. He will focus on the impact that the European encounter with old age has had in America. While aging is often understood as a national problem, in fact the history of age has been shaped by experts and politicians who crossed borders, watching and learning from experiments elsewhere. Prof. Chappel will introduce figures like Abraham Epstein, a principal architect of America’s Social Security program—and one who enthusiastically visited the Soviet Union. For more recent times, he will discuss the founders of assisted living communities and hospice programs. In these cases, and many others, American planners were drawing explicitly on the European example. His talk suggests that students of our aging past, and planners of our aging future too, should be aware of the global dimensions of the issue.
James Chappel is the Gilhuly Family Associate Professor of History at Duke University. He works on the intellectual history of modern Europe and the United States, focusing on themes of religion, gender, and the family. His most recent book is called Golden Years: How Americans Invented and Reinvented Old Age (2024). It is a history of aging, health, and disability in the USA from 1920 to the present.
This lecture is the public keynote lecture of the conference "Ageing, Experience and Difference: The Social History of Old Age in Europe since 1900", convened by Christina von Hodenberg (GHIL) and Helen McCarthy (University of Cambridge).
This lecture will take place as a hybrid event at the GHIL and online via Zoom. In order to attend this event, please register via Eventbrite to take part in person or online.