Biography
Paul Higgs is Professor of Sociology of Ageing at UCL. His research interests stem from work he conducted with Dr Chris Gilleard which has been published in four books: Cultures of Ageing: Self Citizen and Society (2000), and Contexts of Ageing: Class, Cohort and Community (2005). From 2005 to 2008 he directed an ESRC/AHRC funded project, “From passive to active consumers: Older people's consumption 1998–2001”. He also co-authored the book, Medical Sociology and Old Age (2009) with Ian Rees Jones of Cardiff University. Another two books with Chris Gilleard have been published in recent years: Ageing, Corporeality and Embodiment (2013) and Rethinking Old Age: Theorising the Fourth Age (2015), as well as a book on social class and later life edited with Marvin Formosa. From 2009 to 2011 he was a co-organiser of an ESRC funded seminar series on “new ageing populations”. He is currently a co-investigator on two five-year NIHR/ESRC projects (MARQUE and PRIDE) investigating the social aspects of dementia. Professor Higgs is also an editor of the journal Social Theory and Health and co-editor of the 2017 Sociology of Health and Illness monograph which addresses the topic of dementia and the social mind.
Professor Higgs studied for a BSc in Sociology at the Polytechnic of North London and a PhD in Social Policy at the University of Kent. Before moving to UCL in 1994, he was the Eleanor Peel Lecturer in Social Gerontology at St George's Hospital Medical School, London. At UCL he was variously Lecturer, Senior Lecturer and Reader in Medical Sociology. He is currently Professor of the Sociology of Ageing and was elected a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in 2012 and a fellow of the Gerontological Society of America. He is also a visiting professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Bath.
