Dr. Anna I. Corwin received her Ph.D. from UCLA and is a recipient of fellowships from the National Science Foundation and The National Endowment for the Humanities for her research on aging and well-being.  An Associate Professor of Women’s Spirituality and Anthropology at CIIS (California Institute of Integral Studies), Dr. Corwin has spent the last fourteen years researching how everyday practices shape individuals’ experiences of well-being as we age. 

 

EMBRACING AGE

 
 

"The question of why and how religious commitment seems to improve the body’s health is one of the deepest puzzles in social science. Embracing Age suggests that one answer lies in the way people of faith use language to describe their lives and worlds. This beautifully written book will change the way you think about aging."

--Tanya Marie Luhrmann, author of How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others

 
 
 

"The modern world urges us to outrun age, numb pain, and ignore death, but perhaps the secret to longevity and contentedness lies within the walls of a convent, where nuns practice a timeless model of gracious living. Anna Corwin, with a novitiate’s curiosity and an anthropologist’s precision, investigates the source of nuns’ grace and sparkle—and presents it as something we can tap into, too."
--Dan Zak, author of Almighty: Courage, Resistance, and Existential Peril in the Nuclear Age

 
 
 
 

"Corwin’s lush ethnography of convent life unlocks how elderly nuns experience aging in ways that render them healthier and happier than those of us who have taken a secular path. Embracing Age brings readers into nuns’ daily spiritual (intercessory prayers) and peer support (pastoral visits to the infirm). Observations, in-depth interviews, and clinical health measures are brought together to illuminate nuns’ sense of the life-death transition."
--Elinor Ochs, co-editor of Fast-Forward Family: Home, Work, and Relationships in Middle-Class America

 
 
 

"In Embracing Age, Anna Corwin tells us of aging and death through the eyes and experiences of American Catholic nuns. It is revealing, enlightening, a balm for those contemplating what is too often thought of as the pain and indignity of old age. The remarkable part, though, is how much it tells of life itself, and the things that really matter."
--John Archibald, author of Shaking the Gates of Hell: A Search for Family and Truth in the Wake of the Civil Rights Revolution

 

RESEARCH PUBLICATIONS

2021

Anna I. Corwin and Mara Buchbinder. “Culture and control in end-of-life planning” Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. 

2020

Anna I. Corwin and Cordelia Erickson-Davis. “Experiencing presence: An interactive model of perception” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 10(1) 166-182.

2020

Anna I. Corwin and Taylor Brown. “Emotion in the Language of Prayer” In The Routledge Handbook of Language and Emotion, eds. S. Pritzker, J. Fenigson & J. Wilce.