Psychology and History: Interdisciplinary Explorations

As disciplines, psychology and history share a primary concern with the human condition. Yet historically, the relationship between the two fields has been uneasy, marked by a long-standing climate of mutual suspicion. This book engages with the history of this relationship and possibilities for its future intellectual and empirical development. Bringing together internationally renowned psychologists and historians, it explores the ways in which the two disciplines could benefit from a closer dialogue. Thirteen chapters span a broad range of topics, including social memory, prejudice, stereotyping, affect and emotion, cognition, personality, gender and the self. Contributors draw on examples from different cultural contexts - from eighteenth-century Britain, to apartheid South Africa, to conflict-torn Yugoslavia - to offer fresh impetus to interdisciplinary scholarship. Generating new ideas, research questions and problems, this book encourages researchers to engage in genuine dialogue and place their own explorations in new intellectual contexts.

Cristian Tileagă is Senior Lecturer in Social Psychology and a member of the Discourse and Rhetoric Group at Loughborough University. His research centres on developing critical frameworks for researching social and political behaviour. His interests include the discursive analysis of political discourse, collective memory, the critical psychology of racism, and social representations of history. He is author of Discourse Analysis and Reconciliation with the Recent Past (2012, in Romanian) and Political Psychology: Critical Perspectives (Cambridge, 2013).

Jovan Byford is Senior Lecturer in Psychology at The Open University. His research interests include conspiracy theories, Holocaust survivor testimonies and antisemitism. He is the author of four books: Conspiracy Theories: A Critical Introduction (2011), Denial and Repression of Antisemitism: Post-Communist Remembrance of the Serbian Bishop Nikolaj Velimirović (2008), Conspiracy Theory: Serbia vs. the New World Order (2006, in Serbian) and Staro sajmište: a site remembered, forgotten, contested (2011, in Serbian).