Ciafone selected as 2020-2021 CAS Fellow

(Photo by L. Brian Stauffer.)

Amanda Ciafone, assistant professor in the Department of Media & Cinema Studies, was selected as a 2020-2021 University of Illinois Center for Advanced Study Fellow. 

One of the primary missions of CAS is to identify the very best scholars at Illinois. CAS Fellows are untenured University of Illinois faculty members whose proposals are selected in an annual competition. These appointments grant one semester of teaching release time in order to pursue an individual scholarly or creative project. Fellows also participate in a yearly roundtable discussion of research interests and are invited to offer a future CAS presentation. 

Ciafone’s project examines the ways technologies have transformed the experience and understanding of aging with new definitions of productivity, cultural representations of old age, means for financing retirement, mechanisms for independent living, and biotechnical interventions to extend life. Her research explores how the promise of a “successful” old age—independent, productive, and healthy with proper technological assistance enabling self-maintenance—has also come with new expectations, judgments, and inequalities around how people grow old in the 21st century U.S. Ciafone will be taking time off from teaching in Spring 2021 to focus on this project.