Dr Elissa Rodkey

Elissa Rodkey is a historian of women and gender in psychology and an associate professor at Crandall University in New Brunswick, Canada. Most recently she has written about the importance of intellectual community for women in science and on the exclusionary practices of two elite all-male psychology societies. Elissa also helped to develop the website Psychology’s Feminist Voices, which features the oft-forgotten women in the history of psychology. Her work has received praise from other historians of psychology; she won the American Psychological Association Division 26’s Early Career Award and Cheiron’s Young Scholar Award.

Elissa is currently writing a biography of the emotion theorist Magda Arnold (1903-2002) to be titled Neither Rat Nor Robot: Magda Arnold and the Unexpected Persistence of the Soul in 20th Century Psychology. Magda’s life features many dramatic elements, such as her origin as the abandoned illegitimate child of two Austrian opera singers and her sudden conversion to Catholicism at a 1948 psychology conference. Her life also provides an abundance of rich primary sources, most especially nearly 200 intimate letters between her and her Jesuit priest friend that capture the development of Magda’s humanistic, cognitive, and anti-positivist ideas about emotion and science. Such a wealth of primary sources is rare for women like Magda and makes Neither Rat Nor Robot one of the first book-length biographies written on a historical woman in psychology.

For behind the scenes on the research process see:
https://gesellequalsgazelle.wordpress.com/

Twitter: @elissarodkey