Story, Meaning, Agency, and Others
I was born in Pennsylvania, and grew up mostly in Ohio, where I did my undergraduate studies in Psychology and English Literature at Case Western Reserve University. I then went on to a PhD in Psychology at Stanford University, and from there to a post-doctoral fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, in Berlin, Germany. In 1999, I arrived in Utah as a faculty member in the Psychology department, fell in love with the mountains, and stayed put! My scholarly expertise is in adolescent and young adult identity development. Much of my work has explored how telling stories shapes our memories, emotions, and selves across the lifespan – and the impact listeners have on those stories. More recently, I’ve worked with an amazing group of researchers exploring how young adults whose first year of college was interrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic narrate the events of those years. I put some of this work into application in my role as the Dean of the Honors College at the University of Utah.
Dr. Pasupathi’s talk will show us how deep dives into telling stories can offer insights into resilience that surveys alone never can.