Literature, Film, and the Desirability of Life Extension 

Tuesday 2 December 2025, 9.30am - 4.30pm

Tsuzuki Lecture Theatre, St Anne's College 

Register via Eventbrite.

Free lunch & coffee breaks provided for those who register. Please note places are limited.

Convenors: Andrew Moeller (Faculty of History); Jose Maria Andres Porras (University of North Carolina); Alberto Giubilini (Uehiro Oxford Institute); Katherine Helmick (Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages) 

This event is linked to another event on 1 December 2025, titled Controlling Death: A Discussion on Assisted Dying, Radical Life Extension, and the Meaning of Mortality

Aging and death have always been central to our shared human identity and experience, yet recent advances in artificial intelligence and biotechnology seem to challenge the inevitability of both—whether by epigenetic interventions or digitally preserving consciousness. Still, the ethical and existential questions these developments raise are not new.

Literature and film have long explored the meaning and significance of our shared mortality, sometimes imagining the usurpation of death itself. This artistic engagement can help inform contemporary debates about life extension through imaginative theorizing and challenging narratives that foreground aging and death. (And so the conference is not only concerned with literature and film that address immortality or the usurpation of death, but more broadly the applicability of stories that engage with the meaning, significance, and desirability of mortality and aging).

This conference draws on this rich tradition, inviting scholars of literature, film, and related fields, as well as practitioners, to discuss timely topics relating to life extension, including boredom and alienation, identity and memory, aging and altruism, narrative and selfhood, and the ways cultural memory binds us across generations.

Does immortality risk meaninglessness? Can a longer life deepen love—or diminish it? How could our sense of self change when death itself becomes optional? How might religious viewpoints and hopes for an afterlife shape answers to all the above? In reflecting on these questions, the conference will assess the desirability of significantly extended lifespans, as well as examine the broader question of the place of literature within contemporary ethical debates.

Programme:

9.30am - 10.30am Opening Address 

Speaker:

• Peter Boxall (University of Oxford): Literature as Life Extension 

10.30am - 10.45am Coffee Break

10.45am - 11.45 am Panel 1: Boredom and Disaffectedness 

Speakers:

• Alberto Giubilini (University of Oxford): Immortality: Can You Live with That? Some Philosophical Considerations 

• Robert Eaglestone (Royal Holloway, University of London): Immortality and the Quiet Limit of the World

   

11.45am - 12.45pm Lunch Break

12.45pm - 1.45pm Panel 2: On the Place of Literature in Contemporary Ethical Debates 

Speakers:

• Katherine Helmick (University of Oxford): Death and Immortality in Mazisi Kunene’s Anthem of the Decades 

• Marlene Goldman (University of Toronto); Katherine Shwetz (Rice University, Texas): Elegy vs. Eternity: Literature’s Reckoning with Science's Quest for Immortality: A Health Humanities, Age, and Disability Studies Critique

1.45pm - 2pm Coffee Break

2pm - 3pm Panel 3: Aging and Altruism 

Speakers:

• Katsura Sako (Keio University): Generational Futurity in Speculative Fiction: Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun and the TV series Years and Years

• Sarah Young (University College London): Ageing, Grief and Life Extension in Dostoevsky: From the Sublime to the Ridiculous

3pm - 3.15pm Coffee Break

3.15pm - 4.15pm Panel 4: Film, Narrative, and Self-Understanding in the Light of Radical Life Extension

A Question-and-Answer Style Discussion with Film Scholars:

• Kiri Bloom Walden (University of Oxford)

• Justin Petrisek (University of Notre Dame) 

• Victor Fan (King's College London)

• MaoHui Deng (University of Manchester)

4.15pm - 4.20pm Conclusion 

• William Hurlbut (Stanford University)

Biographies:

Alberto Giubilini is a philosopher at the Uehiro Oxford Institute and Academic Lead of Medical Humanities. He works mostly in public health ethics (particularly the ethics of vaccination) and medical ethics (particularly conscientious objection in healthcare). He is Project Manager for the Oxford team of the EU funded CAVAA project, investigating ethical implications of AI awareness. He has published a book, co-authored, on Rethinking Conscientious Objection in Health Care (Oxford University Press 2025), one on The Ethics of Vaccination (Palgrave MacMillan 2019), and, in Italian, La Morale al Tempo della Bioetica (Morality in the Time of Bioethics) (Le Lettere 2011). 

Robert Eaglestone is Professor of Contemporary Literature and Thought, Royal Holloway, University of London. He’s the author of eight books, including Truth and Wonder: A Literary Introduction to Plato and Aristotle (2022) and The Holocaust and the Postmodern (2004) and the editor or co-editor of ten more. His work has been widely translated.  He has advised the UK government on matters to do with Holocaust memory and to do with literature education. He co-founded the British Association of Contemporary Literary Studies and has spoken at many literary festivals and national media, including ‘In Our Time’ on Hannah Arendt.

Katherine Helmick is a DPhil candidate in Medieval and Modern Languages at the University of Oxford, St Cross College. She completed her MSt in Comparative Literature and Critical Translation at Keble College, Oxford, and her BA in Art with a Spanish minor at Hillsdale College.  Before beginning her doctoral work at Oxford, she taught with the JET program in Japan and served with the Peace Corps in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.

Marlene Goldman is a writer, filmmaker, and English professor at the University of Toronto. Her most recent work explores the question of how we represent stigmatized minds and bodies. She recently published a book on dementia and Alzheimer’s that probes how we decide what’s pathological. Who sets the definitions, the impact of biomedical labels on the people who receive them, and the role of history in shaping stories about illness have all been treated in her artistic and academic career.

Katherine Shwetz is currently a lecturer and research scientist at Rice University in Houston, Texas. She is a medical humanities scholar who specializes in using literary analysis to understand disease stories; her work examines how narrative form and medical beliefs are refracted through narratives about vaccines, contagion, and disease. Her current research project examines the role of literary genre in anti-vaccination conspiracies, with the goal of using the tools of literary analysis to sensitively analyze the charged contemporary conversations around vaccines. Katherine completed her PhD at the University of Toronto.

Katsura Sako is Professor of English at Keio University, Japan. Her main research interests lie in ageing, the life course and contemporary fiction. She is currently developing a project that considers narratives of ageing and walking. She has published in journals such as Contemporary Women’s Writing, The Journal of Aging Studies, Feminist Review, and Women: A Cultural Review. She is also the co-author of Contemporary Narratives of Dementia: Ethics, Ageing, Politics (2019) and the co-editor of Contemporary Narratives of Ageing, Illness and Care (2022) (both with Sarah Falcus).

Sarah Young is Professor of Russian Literature at University College London. She specializes in 19th- and 20th-century Russian and East European literature, with particular focus on the Russian novel, modernist literature, and the supernatural in literary texts. She teaches undergraduate courses on Russian thought, Dostoevsky, and revolutionary-era literature, and MA courses on the 19th-century Russian novel and 20th-century modernism. She serves as Russian and East European section editor for Modern Languages Open and is on the editorial board of The Slavonic and East European Review. She has also been secretary of BASEES, the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies, and is British representative to the International Dostoevsky Society.

Kiri Bloom Walden teaches film and cultural studies at the Oxford Department of Lifelong Learning. Kiri has written and taught courses on a wide variety of subjects, including Science Fiction, Horror, Post-2020 European Cinema, Antipodean Cinema, and the Auteur system. She has also lectured extensively outside of Oxford, at venues including the National Archive and the Hay Festival. Kiri has curated an exhibition on the history of comics at the Bodleian Library and has written three books, all on different areas of British film history. 

Justin Petrisek is the research & publications program manager at the De Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture at the University of Notre Dame. He came to the Center after six years teaching literature, criticism, and film analysis at both The Catholic University of America and George Mason University. 
He holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing, an M.A. in Literature, and a B.A. in English from George Mason University, as well as an M.A. in Theology from the Augustine Institute. His current work follows the intersection of film, philosophy, religion, and culture with a focus on three areas: the evolution of the short story form and its various adaptations across mediums, the role and influence of film history and criticism across cultures, and the relationship between film, the papacy, and the Catholic Church.

Victor Fan is Professor of Film and Media Philosophy at King's College, London. He graduated with a PhD from the Film Studies Program and the Comparative Literature Department of Yale University, and an MFA in Film and Television Productions at School of Cinema-Television (now School of Cinematic Arts), University of Southern California. Prior to his position at King’s, he was Assistant Professor at the Department of East Asian Studies, McGill University. He is the author of Cinema Approaching Reality: Locating Chinese Film Theory (University of Minnesota Press, 2015), Extraterritoriality: Locating Hong Kong Cinema and Media (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), and Cinema Illuminating Reality: Media Philosophy through Buddhism (University of Minnesota Press, 2022).

MaoHui Deng is Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Manchester. He is also the Undergraduate Programme Director for Drama and Film Studies programmes. Prior to starting his role in Manchester, he did a BA in Drama and Screen Studies, an MA in Screen Studies, and a PhD in Drama, all at Manchester. His research is interested in the interdisciplinary conversations between cinema, ageing and dementia, and he ties these different discourses together through the examination of time. He is also interested in Southeast Asian cinemas, and is currently developing a temporal approach towards the examination of the regional cinema. Between 2021 and 2023, he was an elected member of the Executive Committee of the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies (BAFTSS). 

Peter Boxall is Goldsmiths’ Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of New College, Oxford. His research addresses contemporary literature, literary theory, and aesthetics, especially the politics of the literary imagination in modern and contemporary fiction. He has authored several major studies of the novel, including Since Beckett (2009), The Value of the Novel (2015) and The Prosthetic Imagination (2020) . He has also edited the reference guide 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die and co-edited Volume 7 of The Oxford History of the Novel in English.

William B. Hurlbut is Adjunct Professor and Senior Research Scholar in Neurobiology at the Stanford Medical School. He is the founder and principal investigator of the Boundaries of Humanity Project. His primary areas of interest involve the ethical issues associated with advancing biomedical technology, the biological basis of moral awareness, and studies in the integration of theology with the philosophy of biology. He is the author of numerous publications on science and ethics. In addition to teaching at Stanford, he has also worked with NASA on projects in astrobiology and was a member of the Chemical and Biological Warfare Working group at the Center for International Security and Cooperation. From 2002-2009, Dr. Hurlbut served on the President’s Council on Bioethics.

Medical Humanities Hub, TORCH Research Hubs