Angela Xia has recently begun a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Notre Dame's Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism. Cushwa Center postdoctoral fellows dedicate much of their time to their own research and writing projects under the mentorship of Notre Dame faculty. They also actively contribute to the work of the Cushwa Center by supporting event and conference planning and bringing their expertise to bear on other center programming.
Angela Xia
PhD candidate in Religious Studies, University of Pennsylvania
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Research Fellow
The Rest of Life: Hospice, Aging, and the Expansion of Palliative Care in America, 1971-2000
Who cares best for the elderly and those at the end of life, and what does that care look like? In my dissertation project, currently titled “The Rest of Life: Hospice, Aging, and the Expansion of Palliative Care in America, 1971-2000,” I analyze how hospice workers, advocates for the elderly, and unpaid caregivers (i.e. family members, respite care volunteers, etc.) in the United States have answered this question from the 1970s-onward, with particular attention to how religion and identity shaped their ideologies and experiences of care. To support this research, I will consult three Consortium archives (Duke University, the Rockefeller Archives, and the National Library of Medicine) in order to better understand the careers of Dr. Richard Payne (1951-2019) and Dr. Josefina Bautista Magno (1919-2003), two notable yet understudied oncologists who through both their clinical practice and their activism sought to expand hospice access for minority groups, persuade physicians to accept holistic understandings of dying, and bring American palliative care models overseas.
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Angela Xia