Brian Schiff

What are you doing today in your career?

First, I want to thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak with students and alumni at the great University of Michigan. I am very proud to be an alumnus.

In terms of career, I am really fortunate to have an engaging and challenging job. I am Professor and Chair of the Department of Psychology at the American University of Paris (AUP). My career is very intense—I am involved in a number of different activities simultaneously. I teach courses in psychology, including basic ones like Introduction to Psychology and creative specialized courses like Life Stories and Social Memory. I have an active program of scholarship that addresses the theoretical and philosophical foundations of psychology. My first single-authored book, A New Narrative for Psychology (Oxford University Press), was released in the US in July. I employ narrative methods as part of my research on personal and social identity. I am currently preparing a book proposal on the identity stories of Palestinian students with Israeli citizenship at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Recently, I began another phase of my career as the Director of the George and Irina Schaeffer Center for the Study of Genocide, Human Rights and Conflict Prevention. The directorship has added a new dimension to my interactions with students and faculty at AUP, thinking through the dynamics that lead to mass violence and advance conflict resolution. Along with AUP faculty, I am organizing a number of events and conferences on this theme. The largest conference so far, “Words that Kill,” on the links between symbolic violence in language and the media and physical violence, will be held at AUP in May 2018.

What inspires you?

Although I am not naïve, I am still an idealist. I believe in the idea of social progress and the impetus for human betterment that launched the social sciences. But, it is pretty hard to ignore the troubled world that we live in. Right now, I have the violence, racism, and anti-Semitism displayed by American Nazis and White Supremacists in mind. The events that transpired in Charlottesville are particularly troubling. But, climate change, peace, conflict and genocide are also preoccupying concerns. Too often, psychology is left standing on the sidelines, preferring to study the basic, and universal, processes of thinking, feeling and acting. But, I believe that psychology has an important role to play in addressing real-world problems. When all is said and done, these are problems of our own creation and innovative solutions require that we better understand the psychological, social and cultural dynamics at their root. All of my work, even those parts of my scholarship that are more theoretical, revolve around the questions: How can we better understand persons in context? How can we make positive change in the world?

What impact has your Psychology degree at UM had on your career or life?

The impact of of my undergraduate experience at the University of Michigan is profound. But, I wouldn’t limit the impact to my work in psychology only. The intellectual culture of the university and my studies in intellectual history, art history, film, philosophy, comparative literature, environmental studies, and so on, also shaped my scholarly development and perspective on the world. One of my formative intellectual experiences was in the study of communications with Jimmie Reeves who invited me to participate in his graduate seminar on analyzing television and to conduct a research study with him. Jimmie nurtured my budding sense that I could develop my own voice and make an important intellectual contribution. During one of our frequent coffees, Jimmie once told me, “never go into academics.” I guess that I did not listen and this has become a longstanding joke between us. In psychology, I had the opportunity to work with Abigail Stewart and her graduate student Elizabeth Vandewater on longitudinal research on women’s development. But, I think that the two most important academic experiences that I had were with George Rosenwald and Raphael Ezekiel. George Rosenwald’s course “The Psychological Study of Lives” introduced me to an alternative approach to studying psychology through the thick exploration of individual lives. Raphael Ezekiel’s course “Advanced Laboratory in Social Psychology” introduced me to the power of life story interviews as a way of understanding how persons make sense of their life experiences. These academic experiences were transformative and led very naturally to my doctoral studies at The University of Chicago’s Committee on Human Development.

What do you remember most about your time at UM?

A difficult question. There’s too many memories--a flood of memories comes of double cappuccinos, life altering books, walking through the Diag the first days of Spring, friends and girlfriends, meeting people from all over the world, getting lost in the library stacks, harsh winter days, summer evenings in the Arboretum and so on. My undergraduate years were a time of exploration and development, an opening to new ideas and the world, but also of struggle.

What advice would you give to aspiring Psychology students?

Be curious. Read everything you can outside of psychology. Everything is related and will be useful. Many people believe that psychology is reducible to brain function but it isn’t. I think that students should be reading a lot more philosophy, literature, history, sociology and anthropology. Be open to new avenues of inquiry and ideas that challenge the established traditions. Psychology needs innovative thinking.

If you could tell your younger writing self anything, what would it be?

Relax. I would tell myself to be confident that persistence and following my own path will pay off.

If you had to do something differently as an undergraduate or graduate student to become a better writer as an adult, what would you do?

I wish that I had travelled more outside of the US and taken learning other languages more seriously. There is so much to be learned by interacting with others who are different from us. I did not take advantage of these opportunities early in life. So much of my career is focused on understanding others--I wish that I had spent more time laying the groundwork and explored more early on.

What was an early experience where you learned that language had power?

I think that I would return to Raphael Ezekiel’s course and an observation that I made in countless life story interviews that I conducted since. I am fascinated by the power of language in order to interpret, making and re-making, meaning from life experience. In Ezekiel’s course, I was able to interview recovering drug addicts about their experiences of addiction and recovery. What I found was that each person had a story to tell in which both abuse and recovery served a function in their evolving sense of identity. I was blown away by this observation—and still am. From my perspective, the essential quality of persons, and fundamental to our psychology, is that we are, by our nature, interpreters, constantly engaged in the wondrous process of making sense of life and attempting to put these understandings into some comprehensible language. Of course, these interpretations are never made alone, but always in the company of others in a world already filled with meaning, and, also, interpretations are in constant flux—they are flexible, situational, and transient expressions. But, still, language, and more particularly, narrative, is the vehicle for such understanding and the consequences of these constructions are enormous. One of my main scholarly projects follows this path in order to understand how persons, poetically, use language in order to make-present a sense of self, other, and world.