Margaret Morganroth Gullette

Areas of Expertise

Cultural Studies; Age Studies

Email: mgullett@brandeis.edu

Current Project

Margaret will be completing a book on ageism in contemporary American culture (The Ice Floe, Chicago) and seeing it through to publication in 2010, as well as the essay, “Ageism and Social Change,” for A Guide to Humanistic Studies in Aging (John Hopkins).  She will also be fund-raising for the Free High School for Adults in Newton’s Sister City, San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua.

Biography

Margaret Morganroth Gullette is a cultural critic and prize-winning writer of nonfiction, an internationally known age critic, essayist, and activist. Her latest book, Aged by Culture, was chosen as a “Noteworthy Book of the Year” by the Christian Science Monitor. Declining to Decline: Cultural Combat and the Politics of the Midlife won the Emily Toth Award as the best feminist book on American popular culture. Margaret’s focus on the midlife (the Midlife Fictions series) has expanded to become Age Studies. Age studies from childhood on can be as powerful as studies of gender or race in empowering people to challenge American age culture.

Margaret has written for N.Y. Times, Ms., Nation, Boston Globe, American Scholar, American Prospect, womensenews.org; Feminist Studies, Representations, Journal of the History of Sexuality; she has appeared on “Brian Lehrer,” “The Connection,” WBAI, “To the Best of Our Knowledge,” CultureShocks. A recipient of NEH, ACLS, and Bunting Fellowships, she is a member of PEN-America. Her work is cited by scholars and journalists and used in courses.

In Nicaragua, her work has helped hundreds of adults to become literate and go on to secondary education.

Education

Ph.D., Harvard University

M.A., University of California, Berkeley

B. A., Radcliffe College

Representative Publications

Gullette, Margaret.  Aged By Culture.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.

Gullette, Margaret.  Declining to Decline: Cultural Combat and the Politics of Midlife.  Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1997.

Links

Gullette interview with Adriane Berg (January 6, 2010)

Aged by Culture

Declining to Decline: Cultural Combat and the Politics of the Midlife

Safe at Last in the Middle Years: The Invention of the Midlife Progress Novel

The Daughters of Danaus

Selected Publications and Lectures

Postmaternity Bibiliography

Activism

Newton San Juan 

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