Speaker Bios
Michael Anderson
Michael Anderson received his Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from the University of California, Los Angeles. After completing a post-doctoral fellowship in cognitive neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley, he joined the psychology faculty at the University of Oregon, where he was director of the Memory Control Laboratory through 2007. Anderson is now Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit at the University of Cambridge. His research investigates the roles of inhibitory control processes as a cause of forgetting in long-term memory. Anderson’s recent work has focused on inhibitory control as a model of adaptive forgetting, with an emphasis on control mechanisms by which memory traces of unwelcome past experiences can be disrupted. This work begins to specify the mechanisms by which people adapt the functioning of their memories in the aftermath of traumatic experience.
Patricia Bauer
Patricia Bauer is the Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Psychology at Emory University. Professor Bauer studies the development of memory from a psychological perspective. Motivating her research is the goal of explaining why we remember and why we forget, and whether the explanations for remembering and forgetting differ over developmental time. To address this question, she studies infants and children in whom memory is just beginning to develop, and tracks age-related change throughout the school years into adolescence. She also asks adults as well as children to reflect on the past, for insights into differences in what is remembered. Her research is funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
Cathy Caruth
Cathy Caruth is Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters at Cornell University and teaches in the departments of English and Comparative Literature. She focuses on the languages of trauma and testimony, on literary theory, and on contemporary discourses concerning the annihilation and survival of language. Her most recent books are Literature in the Ashes of History (Hopkins, 2013) and Listening to Trauma: Conversations with Leaders in the Theory and Treatment of Catastrophic Experience (Interviews and Photography by Cathy Caruth) (Hopkins, 2014).
Evelyne Ender
Evelyne Ender is the author of Sexing the Mind: Nineteenth-Century Fictions of Hysteria and of Architexts of Memory: Literature, Science, and Autobiography. Her research bears on issues of body and mind, in relation to literary representations and in a context of history of ideas. She has published essays, chapters and articles on literature and illness, on consciousness, déjà-vu and is currently finishing a book on creativity and handwriting. She is Professor of French at Hunter College and is currently Visiting Professor in French at Johns Hopkins University, where she also teaches in the new major in the Medical Sciences and Humanities.
Mara Mather
Mara Mather, Professor of Gerontology and Psychology at the University of Southern California, conducts research focusing on emotion-cognition interactions with a particular focus on how emotional arousal shapes perception and memory. She has received a National Institutes of Health K02 Career Development award and an Alexander von Humboldt fellowship to investigate brain mechanisms of emotion-cognition interactions in aging, as well as the Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology from the American Psychological Association. Mather received her Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from Princeton and completed her undergraduate degree and postdoctoral training at Stanford University.
Laura Otis
Laura Otis is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of English at Emory University. With an MA in Neuroscience and a PhD in Comparative Literature, she compares the creative thinking of scientists and literary writers. Otis is the author of Organic Memory, Membranes, Networking, and Müller’s Lab; the translator of Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s Vacation Stories; and the editor of Literature and Science in the Nineteenth Century. Her most recent book, Rethinking Thought, analyzes the different ways that people use words and images in their thinking. For her interdisciplinary studies of literature and science, she received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2000.
Alan Richardson
Alan Richardson is Professor of English at Boston College. His books include: British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind (2001) and The Neural Sublime: Cognitive Theories and Romantic Texts (2011). He is co-editor with Francis Steen of a special issue of Poetics Today on "Literature and the Cognitive Revolution" (2002) and with Ellen Spolsky of The Work of Fiction: Cognition, Culture, and Complexity (2004). His current research concerns literary and scientific conceptions of imagination from Romanticism to the present.
Daniel Schacter
Daniel Schacter is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, where he has been a faculty member since 1991. Research in Schacter’s laboratory has explored the relation between explicit and implicit forms of memory, the nature of memory distortions, how individuals use memory to imagine possible future events, as well as the effects of aging on memory. Schacter has also written several books, including Searching for Memory and The Seven Sins of Memory, and has received a number of awards, including the Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions from the American Psychological Association, the William James Fellow Award from the Association for Psychological Science, and election to the National Academy of Sciences.
Michael Anderson
Michael Anderson received his Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from the University of California, Los Angeles. After completing a post-doctoral fellowship in cognitive neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley, he joined the psychology faculty at the University of Oregon, where he was director of the Memory Control Laboratory through 2007. Anderson is now Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit at the University of Cambridge. His research investigates the roles of inhibitory control processes as a cause of forgetting in long-term memory. Anderson’s recent work has focused on inhibitory control as a model of adaptive forgetting, with an emphasis on control mechanisms by which memory traces of unwelcome past experiences can be disrupted. This work begins to specify the mechanisms by which people adapt the functioning of their memories in the aftermath of traumatic experience.
Patricia Bauer
Patricia Bauer is the Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Psychology at Emory University. Professor Bauer studies the development of memory from a psychological perspective. Motivating her research is the goal of explaining why we remember and why we forget, and whether the explanations for remembering and forgetting differ over developmental time. To address this question, she studies infants and children in whom memory is just beginning to develop, and tracks age-related change throughout the school years into adolescence. She also asks adults as well as children to reflect on the past, for insights into differences in what is remembered. Her research is funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
Cathy Caruth
Cathy Caruth is Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters at Cornell University and teaches in the departments of English and Comparative Literature. She focuses on the languages of trauma and testimony, on literary theory, and on contemporary discourses concerning the annihilation and survival of language. Her most recent books are Literature in the Ashes of History (Hopkins, 2013) and Listening to Trauma: Conversations with Leaders in the Theory and Treatment of Catastrophic Experience (Interviews and Photography by Cathy Caruth) (Hopkins, 2014).
Evelyne Ender
Evelyne Ender is the author of Sexing the Mind: Nineteenth-Century Fictions of Hysteria and of Architexts of Memory: Literature, Science, and Autobiography. Her research bears on issues of body and mind, in relation to literary representations and in a context of history of ideas. She has published essays, chapters and articles on literature and illness, on consciousness, déjà-vu and is currently finishing a book on creativity and handwriting. She is Professor of French at Hunter College and is currently Visiting Professor in French at Johns Hopkins University, where she also teaches in the new major in the Medical Sciences and Humanities.
Mara Mather
Mara Mather, Professor of Gerontology and Psychology at the University of Southern California, conducts research focusing on emotion-cognition interactions with a particular focus on how emotional arousal shapes perception and memory. She has received a National Institutes of Health K02 Career Development award and an Alexander von Humboldt fellowship to investigate brain mechanisms of emotion-cognition interactions in aging, as well as the Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology from the American Psychological Association. Mather received her Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from Princeton and completed her undergraduate degree and postdoctoral training at Stanford University.
Laura Otis
Laura Otis is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of English at Emory University. With an MA in Neuroscience and a PhD in Comparative Literature, she compares the creative thinking of scientists and literary writers. Otis is the author of Organic Memory, Membranes, Networking, and Müller’s Lab; the translator of Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s Vacation Stories; and the editor of Literature and Science in the Nineteenth Century. Her most recent book, Rethinking Thought, analyzes the different ways that people use words and images in their thinking. For her interdisciplinary studies of literature and science, she received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2000.
Alan Richardson
Alan Richardson is Professor of English at Boston College. His books include: British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind (2001) and The Neural Sublime: Cognitive Theories and Romantic Texts (2011). He is co-editor with Francis Steen of a special issue of Poetics Today on "Literature and the Cognitive Revolution" (2002) and with Ellen Spolsky of The Work of Fiction: Cognition, Culture, and Complexity (2004). His current research concerns literary and scientific conceptions of imagination from Romanticism to the present.
Daniel Schacter
Daniel Schacter is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, where he has been a faculty member since 1991. Research in Schacter’s laboratory has explored the relation between explicit and implicit forms of memory, the nature of memory distortions, how individuals use memory to imagine possible future events, as well as the effects of aging on memory. Schacter has also written several books, including Searching for Memory and The Seven Sins of Memory, and has received a number of awards, including the Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions from the American Psychological Association, the William James Fellow Award from the Association for Psychological Science, and election to the National Academy of Sciences.