Research Team

Dr Melanie Lovatt

Melanie is the Principal Investigator on the project. She is a lecturer in sociology at the University of Stirling. Her main research interests converge around time, the life course, health and illness, and relationships. She is increasingly interested in fictional representations of ageing and time, and how fiction can be used as a research method. Her PhD (University of Sheffield, 2016) used material culture to explore everyday life in an older people’s residential home.

University of Stirling staff profile | ORCID iD

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Dr Valerie Wright

Valerie is the Research Fellow on the project. She has significant research and teaching experience with a background in gender, social and political history and urban studies. Prior to joining the University of Stirling she worked on Leverhulme funded projects on deindustrialisation in post-war Scotland and the history of housing in the West of Scotland.

Valerie’s current research on the project focuses on exploring older adult’s perceptions of future time and hopes and desires for the future. Other research interests, on which she has published, include:

• The effects and legacy of the processes of deindustrialisation on communities and individuals in post-war Scotland
• The changing structure of women’s employment in Britain in the post-war years
• Women’s engagement in politics (broadly defined) and role in political change in twentieth century Britain
• The long-term impact of the residualisation of council housing on the lack of affordable housing in the present day
• Children’s use of urban space and the ways in which this was altered by urban planning in the post war years, especially with regards to play

She completed her PhD in the Department of Economic and Social History at the University of Glasgow.

University of Stirling Staff Profile | ORCID iD

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Dr Jade Elizabeth French

Jade is a Research Fellow on the project. She is interested in how a ‘poetics of ageing’ manifests in twentieth-century poetry and fiction, with further research interests in embodiment, temporalities of lateness and lived experience. Prior to joining the University of Stirling she completed her PhD at Queen Mary, University of London in 2021. Jade also co-runs the research project ‘Decorating Dissidence’, which explores the conceptual, aesthetic and political qualities of craft from modernism to the contemporary. 

University of Stirling staff profile | ORCID iD

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