Jefferson A. Singer

Jefferson A. Singer, Faulk Foundation Professor of Psychology, also served as Dean of the College from 2015-2021. He is the author of six books and over 100 articles, chapters, and book reviews in the fields of personality, autobiographical memory, and clinical psychology.

Jefferson A. Singer Curriculum Vitae (pdf)

He received the 2010 Henry A. Murray Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology of the American Psychology Association. Established in 1978, the award is presented annually to recognize an individual who has made distinguished contributions to the study of lives. It is given to encourage those working in the demanding and difficult tradition pioneered by the late Harvard Psychology Professor Henry Murray.

He is a former director of the Holleran Center for Community Action and Public Policy, a Connecticut College interdisciplinary center focused on the development of active citizenship and leadership.

Singer is the 2008 recipient of the College's Nancy Batson Nisbet Rash Research Award. The award named in Professor Rash's honor provides a research fund to be presented annually to an outstanding member of the faculty.

Singer was the 2005 recipient of Theodore R. Sarbin Award for his work in narrative psychology, presented by Division 24 (Society for Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology) of the American Psychological Association.

He received a 2003 Fulbright Distinguished Scholar Award to go to the United Kingdom where he researched self-defining memories. A ESRC/SSRC Visiting Fellowship in 2008 also provided him an opportunity to continue his collaborative work on autobiographical memory with Martin Conway, Ph.D., in the psychology department at the University of Leeds.

He is the author of six books: The Proper Pirate: Robert Louis Stevenson's Quest for Identity (NY: Oxford University Press); Positive Couple Therapy: Using We-Stories to Enhance Resilience (with Karen Skerrett; NY: Routledge); Personality and Psychotherapy; Treating the Whole Person (NY: Guilford Press); Memories that Matter (Oakland, CA: New Harbinger); Message in a Bottle (NY: The Free Press); and The Remembered Self: Emotion and Memory in Personality (with Peter Salovey, NY: The Free Press), and the co-editor of a seventh, At Play in the Fields of Consciousness: Essays in Honor of Jerome L. Singer (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum; again with Peter Salovey).

Jefferson Singer maintains the Self-Defining Memories Research Web-Source.

Professor Singer has served as an associate editor for the journals “Qualitative Psychology,” "Contemporary Psychology" and "Journal of Personality." He is on the editorial boards of the "Journal of Personality," “Imagination, Personality and Cognition,” and “Pragmatic Case Studies in Psychotherapy.”

View the Connecticut College psychology department website.

Majoring in Psychology.