Naming the age cohorts began as a connivance with niche marketing, but before long the media turned it into an explanation of American economic history under global capitalism.

Cultural critic and pioneer in age studies, Margaret Morganroth Gullette shows how new characters creep into the social text, modifying not only our views of others and of ourselves, but also of the ways the world works. Gullette is the author of Declining to Decline: Cultural Combat at the Politics of the Midlife, which won a 1998 award as the best feminist book on American popular culture.

This lecture is held in conjunction with the Center for Advanced Study interdisciplinary initiative Cultural Functions of `the Midlife' in Contemporary America: Generations, Race, Class, Culture and History. On Monday, March 27 Katherine Newman, Ford Foundation Professor of Urban Studies, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, speaks on growing old in the inner cities and on Wednesday, April 5, Thomas Weisner, departments of Psychiatry and Anthropology, University of California at Los Angeles, explores the impact of the counterculture values on the "kids of hippies."

Sponsored by: Center for Advanced Study

In conjunction with: Afro-American Studies and Research Program, Department of Anthropology, Department of History, Department of Speech Communication, Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, School of Social Work, Women's Studies Program.