Michael Pettit (York University) will be editing a new book series with Oxford University Press dedicated to New Histories of Psychology.
The series aims to promote the best research of both historians of science and psychologist-historians exploring psychology’s past. In recent years, the history of psychology has become increasingly international in scope, moving beyond the dominant historical center in North America. It is also a multi-disciplinary field, drawing upon the expertise of historians and psychologists obviously, but also historically-oriented scholars in sociology, geography, anthropology, and other areas of Science and Technology Studies.
In terms of scope, the focus of this series will extend from the history of psychology as a discipline to include the histories of cognate fields such as psychiatry, neuroscience, and psychoanalysis as well as related areas such as histories of the emotions, the senses, and subjectivity.
He is particularly excited to acquire and promote theoretically-informed books focused on new voices from the past and grounded in critical race, decolonial, feminist, queer, disability rights, multispecies and other counter-storytelling perspectives. Psychology has become an omnipresent feature of the public sphere as a set of concepts for self-understanding and as technologies of measurement and control. Understanding psychology’s public-facing nature requires grappling with the discipline’s relationship with various publics: patients, participants, neighboring professions, social movements, educational systems, policy makers, corporations, and creative artists. These different audiences adapt psychology to their own local needs in the process of adopting its insight. Grapping with psychology’s tremendous cultural impact requires attending to this circuitry and mediation among experts and publics.
Sarah L. Harrington will serve as the acquisition editor at Oxford University Press.
The following people have kindly agreed to serve on the advisory board to the series.
- Saulo de Freitas Araujo (Federal University of Juiz de Fora)
- Sunil Bhatia (Connecticut College)
- Cathy Faye (Cummings Center for the History of Psychology)
- Peter Hegarty (Open University)
- Alexandra Hui (Mississippi State University)
- Sarah E. Igo (Vanderbilt University)
- Edward Jones-Imhotep (University of Toronto)
- Dana Simmons (UC Riverside)
Please feel free to get in touch with Michael Pettit (mpettit@yorku.ca) if you’d like to discuss proposing a book for the series.