After receiving her Masters and PhD degrees in Sociology from the University of California-Los Angeles, Dr Dana Rosenfeld was a National Institute of Mental Health Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the University of Kentucky’s Department of Behavioural Science before becoming an Assistant Professor in Sociology at Colorado College, a Lecturer at Royal Holloway University of London’s Department of Health and Social Care, and, most recently, a Senior Lecturer and Reader at Keele University, where she founded and was Director of the Keele Centre for Ageing Research. Dana serves on the editorial boards of Social Theory and Health and the Journal of Aging Studies, as a member of the local committee for the 2019 AIDS Impact Conference, and as a Scientific Advisor at the Tuke Institute.
Dr Dana Rosenfeld is a medical sociologist and social gerontologist with research interests in chronic illness and disability, ageing and the life course, gender and sexuality, and self and identity. She has published widely on lesbian and gay ageing, on the lived experience of illness and disability, and ageing with HIV. She was lead editor of Medicalized Masculinities, the first book to question and critique the recent (and growing) construction of masculinity as a health risk, and sole-authored the first book to approach lesbian and gay ageing through theoretical frames (The Changing of the Guard: Lesbian and Gay Elders, Identity, and Social Change). Her current research centres on HIV, with an emphasis on older age; assistive technologies across the life course; transitions into and out of care provision and care receipt; ageing in prison; and the social dimensions of frailty in later life. She was Principal Investigator on the HIV and Later Life (HALL) project, funded by the Medical Research Council’s Life-long Health and Wellbeing Cross-Council Programme, and Co-Investigator on an Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded series of seminars on HIV communities. Her Leverhulme Research Fellowship investigated how the historical period in which people enter a particular ‘illness arena’ (with a focus on HIV/AIDS), as patients or health activists/advocates, affects their longer-term experiences, practices, and orientations.