About
I am Professor of Sociology at the University of Liverpool. I was Head of the Department of Sociology, Social Policy and Criminology from September 2020 to September 2024, having previously served as Research Lead (2017–2020) and REF Coordinator for the 2021 Research Excellence Framework. I am currently Associate Dean for Research.
My research brings together sociology, feminist theory, ageing and the life course, health and embodiment, and cultural and existential approaches to the lived experience of ageing and gender. Across this work, I am particularly interested in how our lives are shaped by biology without being reducible to it; how bodies and biological processes acquire meaning within particular social, cultural and historical worlds; and how questions of freedom, identity and inequality unfold across the life course.
A major strand of my recent research has focused on frailty, ageing and menopause. As Principal Investigator, I have led two substantial interdisciplinary, empirically based projects. The first, Understanding the varied experiences of frailty in older age with respect to ethnicity: a mixed methods approach (ES/W012510/1), was a £1.1 million multinational project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council through its Inclusive Ageing programme. The project brought sociology into dialogue with clinical medicine, primary care, public health, philosophy and equality research, alongside third-sector partners including Age UK Leicester and the Race Equality Centre.
The second, Minority ethnic women's experience of menopause: a mixed methods study (MR/Y009959/1), was an interdisciplinary Ageing Research Development project funded by the Medical Research Council at approximately £400,000. Working with colleagues in sociology and at Liverpool Women's Hospital, the project investigates women's experiences of menopause across minority ethnic communities in the Liverpool City Region, with the aim of contributing both to sociological understanding and to improvements in clinical practice.
These projects have generated wider interdisciplinary work on ageing, frailty and menopause. I am editor of Refiguring the Menopause, an interdisciplinary Open Access collection bringing together perspectives from the arts, humanities, social sciences and clinical research, which is currently in press with Liverpool University Press. I am also co-editing, with Paul Higgs (UCL), Mapping Frailty and the Fourth Age: Disciplinary Perspectives and Agendas, also with Liverpool University Press.
I also co-lead, with Melissa Melby (University of Delaware), the Academy of Medical Sciences networking project Cultures and biologies of menopause: constructing an interdisciplinary cross-cultural framework for menopause (NGR2/1407). The network brings together evolutionary anthropologists, clinicians, social scientists and other researchers working across different national and disciplinary contexts to develop genuinely cross-cultural and transdisciplinary approaches to menopause. This work is concerned both with generating new conceptual frameworks and with improving front-line practice.
A second major strand of my work is in sociological and feminist theory. I have drawn extensively on Simone de Beauvoir to rethink contemporary questions of gender, ageing, embodiment, temporality and freedom. This work has appeared in journals including Analyse & Kritik, Simone de Beauvoir Studies and The Gerontologist. More broadly, I have longstanding interests in cultural gerontology, feminist theory and the sociology of the life course.
I direct the Centre for Ageing and the Life Course, which supports interdisciplinary research in critical and cultural age studies. The Centre explores the material, cultural and life-course processes that shape inequalities in ageing, alongside the subjective meanings and lived experience of health and wellbeing in later life. Patient and Public Involvement is central to this work, and in October 2025 we established Involve, a dedicated PPI group supported by a British Society of Gerontology grant.
I have published widely across sociology, social policy, health, ageing and feminist theory, including in Sociology, The British Journal of Sociology, Social Science & Medicine, Sociology of Health & Illness, Journal of Social Policy, Ageing & Society, Journal of Aging Studies, The Gerontologist, Simone de Beauvoir Studies, Feminist Theology and Feminist Theory. My books include Age Studies: How We Age and Are Aged Through the Life Course and Age, Gender and Sexuality: The Girl in Time, as well as the edited collection, with Jude Robinson, Ageing, the Body and the Gender Regime: Health, Illness and Disease Across the Life Course.
I am Series Editor of Liverpool University Press's Ageing, the Life Course and Society series and sit on the editorial board of The British Journal of Sociology. I was also interviewed for the University of Liverpool's Researcher in Focus podcast series.
Alongside my academic research, I have developed a substantial programme of public sociology. I write the Substack newsletter Beauvoirian Feminism, where I bring sociology and feminist theory into public conversation through essays on gender, ageing, embodiment, freedom, class, academic culture and contemporary social life. The newsletter has an international readership across more than 35 countries.
I also write regularly for publications including Compact , The Critic and UnHerd addressing questions including gender and freedom, class suffering, ageing, artificial intelligence, academic culture and the changing moral landscape of contemporary society.
Across both my academic and public writing, my aim is to practise a sociology that is theoretically ambitious, empirically grounded and capable of speaking beyond the academy: a sociology attentive to embodiment and lived experience, and to questions of freedom, inequality and change across the life course.
Funded Fellowships
- International Academic Fellowship (Leverhulme Trust, 2014)