Historicizing Calendar Age
Time layered: wall, calendar, clock.
Historicizing Calendar Age
Organized by Ben Maldonado, Hannah Marcus, and Ludwig Pelzl
17–18 April 2026 · Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
This workshop is generously sponsored by the
Harvard University Department of the History of Science, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, and the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions of the European Union
Calendar, or chronological, age is a pillar of modern society, law, and identity: it determines age boundaries, structures the institutionalization of the life cycle, and informs self-perception across all stages of human lives. Our familiarity with calendar age — to the point that it is hard to conceive of age without it — is the starting point of the inquiry this workshop seeks to contribute to, aiming at the historicization of this fundamental social category.
The workshop invites contributions from fields as diverse as the history of medicine and science, the history of the state, and social and cultural histories that highlight how such a category was used in practice. The chosen chronological arc stretches from the early modern period into the twentieth century, focusing on North America and Europe, but also looking beyond.
Friday, 17 April
9:00 AM — Opening Remarks
Hannah Marcus
9:15 AM to 10:45 AM — Keynote Lecture
Corinne Field: "Five Dollars for Telling My Age": Sojourner Truth's Black Feminist Critique of Calendar Age (Keynote Poster)
11:15 AM to 1:00 PM — Panel I: Calendar Age in Premodern History
Emmanuel Walz: Calendar Age & Administration in Ptolemaic Egypt
Ludwig Pelzl: The People Without Age. Unawareness of Calendar Age and Stigmatization in 18th-Century Germany
David Troyansky: Chronological Age and the Longue Durée
Susannah Ottaway: Aging and Visual Impairment in the Long Eighteenth Century
Chair: Hannah Marcus
2:00 PM to 3:30 PM — Panel II: "What Is Calendar Age?"
Sasha Johfre: Beyond the Calendar: A Multidimensional Framework for Historicizing Age
Marco Nathan: The Legacy of the Einstein-Bergson Debate on the Nature of Time
Noa Lahav Ayalon: Spinoza on Age and Time
Chair: Nick Syrett
4:00 PM to 5:30 PM — Panel III: Calendar Age, Health and Risk
Maud Jansen: "The Age Factor" in Hip Fracture Care: How Precarity Informed Therapeutic Change
Anne Barrett: Governing Mobility by Age: The Emergence of Chronological Age as a Risk Category in Transportation Policy
Ben Maldonado: Nuclear Aging: American Radiation Research, Colonial Science, and Measuring Age in the Marshall Islands
Chair: Allan Brandt
Saturday, 18 April
9:30 AM to 10:45 AM — Panel IV: Calendar Age and the Life Cycle
Laura Tisdall: Adulthood, Maturity and Chronological Age in Cold War Britain (c. 1956–c. 1989)
Layla Koch: Converting to Adulthood: Protestant Coming-of-Age Models in the Nineteenth-Century United States
Chair: Corinne Field
11:15 AM to 12:45 PM — Round Table: Concluding Reflections on Calendar Age
Hannah Marcus, Nick Syrett, Corinne Field & Daniel Smail
Chair: Ludwig Pelzl
Location: Harvard Science Center, Room 469, 1 Oxford St, Cambridge MA
For questions, please contact Johannes.Pelzl@eui.eu and bmaldonado@g.harvard.edu.
