Lamb's Blog

Erin Gentry Lamb was the inaugural Director of the HASTAC Scholars Program in 2008-2009. She completed her PhD in English in 2008 at Duke University, and as of Fall 2009 is an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Humanities at Hiram College in Ohio. Her scholarly interests include aging and critical gerontology, the cultural study of medicine, science and technology, bioethics, social justice, science-fiction, new media and the body, and 19th and 20th century American literature. Her dissertation, The Age of Obsolescence: Senescence and Scientific Rejuvenation in Twentieth Century America, traces the creation and circulation of several contemporary anti-aging cultural narratives (for example, the narrative of aging as a disease that science needs to cure) back to turn-of-the-twentieth-century changes in science, medicine, labor practices, financial policies, national identity and international competition. She argues that during those first decades of the twentieth century, the quest for the fountain of youth shifted from the stuff of legend to a driving motivation behind modern science.