Biography

I received my PhD in Cognitive, Social, and Developmental Psychology in January 2011 from the New School for Social Research, in New York City. Following this, I took a position as a postdoctoral fellow at the Center on Autobiographical Memory Research, at Aarhus University in Denmark. Throughout my Ph.D. and postdoc, I was involved in several lines of research focusing on collective memory, autobiographical memory, and social influences on memory.

I took my post at the University of Portsmouth in August 2016. At Portsmouth I am a member of both the International Centre for Research in Forensic Psychology and the Centre for Situated Action and Communication. 

Research interests

Broadly speaking, my research looks at the factors that influence people’s memories for their personal past (i.e., autobiographical memory) and the collective past of their community (i.e., collective memory). More specifically, my research agenda currently encompass three discrete lines of work: (1) Research on the reminiscence bump in both autobiographical and collective memory, referring to the disproportionate number of autobiographical and collective memories dating from youth and early adulthood; (2) research on the youth bias, a newfound cognitive bias I have recently identified, which refers to the widely-shared expectation that important public events are most likely to occur in one’s adolescence or early adulthood; and (3) research on social and cultural influences on memory, such as conversational effects.