Dr. Elizabeth Barry (University of Warwick)
Guest lecture: I’ve been waiting for it all my life": Beckett, Modernism and the Phenomenology of Old Age.
Dr. Elizabeth Barry
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About Dr Elizabeth Barry
Dr Elizabeth Barry is Associate Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. She has long been interested in literature in relation to psychology, psychiatry and the mind, publishing a monograph on Samuel Beckett in 2006, editing an issue of the Journal of Beckett Studies in 2008 on 'Beckett, Language and the Mind', and an issue of the Journal of Medical Humanities on 'Beckett and Medicine' in 2016. Her current interests fall squarely in the field of ageing studies, focusing on the perception of time in old age, the challenge to narrativity, and concepts of personhood in advanced old age.
Dr. Barry has worked in the area of English and European modernism, with a specialism in theatre, publishing a monograph on Samuel Beckett (Palgrave Macmillan) in 2006. She has long been interested in literature in relation to psychology, psychiatry and the mind, editing an issue of the Journal of Beckett Studies in 2008 on 'Beckett, Language and the Mind', and an issue of the Journal of Medical Humanities (Springer) on 'Beckett and Medicine' in 2016.
She has held two government grants to study literature and theatre in relation to psychological and neurological disorders of self ('Beckett and Brain Science' in 2012-13, and 'Modernism, Medicine and the Embodied Mind' in 2014-16). An event she organized at Warwick led to the commissioning by the UK National Health Service of workshops using literature to foster compassion and teach clinical skills in old age care (2013).
Her current interests fall squarely in the field of ageing studies, focusing on the perception of time in old age, the challenge to narrativity, and concepts of personhood in advanced old age. She was a Visiting Fellow at the Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington in 2015, working with Kathleen Woodward, and she organized a symposium on ageing, embodiment and the self at Warwick in 2016, featuring such prominent age scholars as Chris Gilleard, Helen Small and Lucy Burke. She is also involved in a research network seeking to expand the reach and effectiveness of 'Narrative Medicine'.