Elizabeth Barry

Elizabeth Barry is interested in the psychology, neurobiology and philosophy of time, and how these approaches might inform readings of literary time. She is working on a monograph on ageing and embodied time, investigating the conspicuous absence of ageing and old age in philosophies of lived time and embodiment, and developing a phenomenological framework with which to read ageing in literature. This work engages with ideas of contingency, expectation, finitude, and the time of (institutional and intersubjective) care. As part of this work, she is thinking about the problems of retention and protention in dementia, and working with psychiatrists, gerontologists and artists to explore interventions (including music and laughter) that address this debilitating loss of temporal capacity. She organized the second event of the 'Time and Temporality' network, a workshop on Temporality, Medicine and the Mind, at Warwick in June 2014, and an AHRC-funded symposium on Ageing, Embodiment and the Self in May 2016. She is an international partner on the Historicizing the Ageing Self project, funded by the Norwegian Research Council and based at the Universiry of Bergen, and is organizing a symposium on Living a Good Life in Older Age in July 2018, funded by the project. She tweets on topics related to literature, theory and time with the hashtag #littheorytime.

Christina Lupton

Gill Partington

Gill Partington’s work addresses the intersections of time and media. She has published a chapter on the conflicting temporalities of films and books in the work of British Artist John Latham, and her current research into artists books examines how non-codex book forms might produce alternative temporalities of reading and interacting with the page.

She has also been involved in a Wellcome-funded Medical Humanities project entitled Waiting Times, based at Birkbeck College. As research fellow she investigated emerging concepts of time in the field of end-of-life care and chronic illness, as well as co-organising an interdisciplinary symposium on the theme of ‘the chronic’ as a concept that is shaping the temporality of contemporary culture in a broad sense. She also has an article (currently in publication) about the protracted time of care and illness in Marion Coutts’s The Iceberg.