Professor Brockmeier

His interdisciplinary academic background extends far beyond psychology; he holds a PhD in philosophy from Freie Universität Berlin. “I was also very interested in literature, history and art,” he says. “I came to psychology because I wanted to know how we use literature, artworks and music to understand the world and ourselves. Why do we invent imaginary universes all the time?” The discipline allowed Brockmeier to explore a wide variety of topics that he would otherwise not be able to explore. Rather than be pigeonholed in a single cultural field such as art, philosophy or literature, he chose to explore how all his passions were connected. Cultural psychology allows him to explore psychological topics, such as consciousness or identity, while also acknowledging the ways in which people relate to each other in different cultures.

When teaching the subject as a core course in AUP’s psychology major, Brockmeier makes regular use of literature, film and other cultural sources to examine different cultural traditions. A prominent example comes from a long-term research project he conducted in Canada with fellow AUP professor Maria Medved. The study took a cultural anthropological view of the increased rate of heart conditions among First Nations populations. In class, Brockmeier asks students to consider the ways in which Western medical models are entrenched in certain narratives, such as that of colonialism, which may be alienating to indigenous populations. “Cree people define illness differently,” he explains. “You end up exploring political issues even though you may have intended only to research heart disease.” To illustrate this point, Brockmeier draws on First Nations literature and screens Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, a 2001 film set in pre-colonization Canada and made by indigenous filmmakers. He then asks students to reflect on what is different about First Nations people’s own narratives of their cultural traditions.

Brockmeier’s current research focuses on understanding time and temporality, not only in the context of measuring and perceiving time but also in the context of how individuals interpret their own lifetimes. “How do we see ourselves in the complex, layered system of past, present and future?” he asks. “We all continuously negotiate this synthesis, but we do it within very different cultural traditions.” Brockmeier works with research subjects who operate outside of the traditional narratives of time; he notes increasingly that traditional stories of linear individual time are starting to dissolve. “Young people like our AUP students have such an enormously open horizon,” he explains. “They combine what I call different islands of temporality – circular or elliptical movements that are more fragmented and less part of a single narrative.” Brockmeier aims to uncover new perceptions of how a lifetime is defined, exploring how changing cultural models of time shape individual temporalities. He explains, for example, how there are languages and cultures that conceive of time as something that moves backwards. “For me, such ideas are even more emphasized because of the lifetime achievement award,” he says. “It’s an odd feeling to have people look back over your life while you are still living it forward!”

Professor Brockmeier’s recent publications include Beyond the Archive: Memory, Narrative, and the Autobiographical Process (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2015; revised paperback version 2018); Cultura e narrazione [Culture and Narrative], (Milan: Mimesis, 2014); Beyond Loss: Dementia, Memory, and Identity (ed. with L.-C. Hyden and H. Lindemann Nelson, Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); and the paperback edition of Literacy, Narrative and Culture (ed. with M. Wang and D. R. Olson, London: Routledge, 2014).