Keynote Lecture 1 - Annual Conference | Mita Banerjee (Mainz) Successful Aging? Looking at America at 250 through the Gated Retirement Community “The Villages,” Florida
Join us at our 2026 Annual Conference on 17-19 June.
The first keynote lecture will take place on 17 June at 17:00 in H24 in the UR Vielberth Building. It will be given by Prof. Dr. Mita Banerjee, Chair of American Studies at the University of Mainz, Member of the Obama Institute Executive Board and Speaker of the LSC Scientific Advisory Board.
Successful Aging? Looking at America at 250 through the Gated Retirement Community “The Villages,” Florida
Abstract | As the nation turns 250, one question is more contested than ever: What precisely does the nation look like? And how exactly does the US look back at its own history? This talk explores these questions through the prism of one particular location: The gated retirement community “The Villages,” Florida. At its 250th anniversary, the US celebrates its independence as a nation; in The Villages, inhabitants celebrate their independence as individuals.
The Villages can be seen as a site not just of “successful” or healthy aging, but also of wealthy aging. With its 200,000 inhabitants, The Villages replicates the US in miniature, featuring “villages” in the style of the US Southwest or New England. Designed by the makers of Disneyworld, it creates a specific image of the US not just in terms of scenery, but also of ideology. Through its “faux history” buildings, this “Disneyland for Adults” resurrects a glorious American past, from which settler colonialism or slavery are entirely absent. In the 2025 presidential election, the inhabitants of The Villages, driving through their town in golf carts, sported signs with the caption “honk for Trump.” In The Villages, the successful aging of the nation and the successful aging of wealthy retirees are thus more closely connected than it may at first seem.
Bio | Prof. Dr. Mita Banerjeeis Chair of American Studies at the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. Her interdisciplinary research explores how literature, culture, medicine, and social discourse shape understandings of identity, difference, and human experience. Over the course of her career, she has worked extensively in fields including Aging Studies, Medical Humanities, Critical Race Theory, Indigenous Studies, and life-writing research.
As part of the DFG-funded CRC 1482 Studies in Human Differentiation, Mita Banerjee is PI and co-lead on the subproject "Best Agers/Best Places: Successful Aging and Spatial Human Differentiation," where she explores how ideas of “successful aging” are produced, represented, and negotiated in modern societies. Her current research examines the cultural narratives surrounding later life, longevity, and age-based differentiation, with particular attention to the ways older adults are portrayed in media, autobiographies, and digital culture. She has published widely on aging, including work on centenarians’ life writing, social media representations of aging, and the intersections of age, performance, and identity.
Professor Banerjee has held academic appointments and research fellowships in Germany and the United States, including at University of California, Berkeley. At Mainz, she has played a central role in major interdisciplinary research initiatives exploring human differentiation, life sciences, and lived experience. Her work brings together perspectives from the humanities, social sciences, and medical fields to illuminate how societies understand aging, health, and human diversity.
She is speaker of the LSC Europe and America's Scientific Advisory Board and we are delighted to welcome her to Regensburg.
The Leibniz ScienceCampus 2026 Annual Conference is supported by the Hans Vielberth Regensburg University Foundation. The conference takes place in cooperation with REAF.