Past Conferences

Celebrating a career. Imagining the future of psychology.

Toward the Psychological Humanities brought together an international community of scholars to honor Mark Freeman’s remarkable career and his contributions to psychology and the human sciences. Across nearly four decades as Professor of Psychology at the College of the Holy Cross, Freeman’s work has explored narrative, memory, identity, ethics, aesthetics, and the relationship between psychology and the humanities. The conference took his work as both an occasion for celebration and a point of departure for thinking about the future of psychological inquiry.

Three days of conversation

Over three days, presentations and conversations explored the psychological humanities from a wide range of disciplinary and methodological perspectives. Topics included narrative and agency, tragedy and moral experience, memory and dementia, interpretation and meaning, art and aesthetics, selfhood, migration, poetry, and the possibilities of humanistic approaches to psychology.

Looking Forward

The conference celebrated Mark Freeman’s contributions while also carrying forward a question central to his work: What might psychology become when it takes the humanities seriously?

The conversations in Paris reflected a shared commitment to forms of psychological inquiry attentive to narrative, ethics, history, culture, aesthetics, and the complexity of human experience. In this sense, the gathering was not only retrospective. It was an invitation to continue imagining the future of the psychological humanities.

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Bringing together artists, scholars, psychotherapists, and practitioners from around the world, the 2026 Attention and Flourishing Conference at the University of Navarra examined the undertheorized relationship between the virtue of attention, mental health, and the flourishing of individuals and communities. Hosted in the University's Museum, the conference explored the modes of attention at play in artistic practices and the spaces dedicated to them, considering how such approaches can foster richer notions of mental health, wellbeing, and the life well-lived.

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The Society for Qualitative Inquiry in Psychology (SQIP) was thrilled to host their annual meeting in 2024 at Boston College. The society invited scholars, practitioners, and students to contribute to a vibrant discussion that challenges the status quo and reimagines psychological knowledge. The field of psychology stands at a critical juncture, where the imperative to reflect on and address its historical underpinnings in racism and colonialism is undeniable. The conference encouraged submissions that engage critically with psychology's racist and colonial past, offer reflexive qualitative research, and propose paradigms or methods that foreground knowledge from historically underrepresented or marginalized communities.

View the Official SQIP Website

Boston College was honored to host the annual Spring Meeting of the Society for Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology (STPP – APA Division 24) in 2023. This gathering brought together scholars, practitioners, and students to build community and exchange ideas around the theory, practice, and reimagining of psychology as both a discipline and a force for social change. ​The conference's presidential theme was “Constructing the Psychological Humanities.”

View the Official Division 24 (APA) Website

The Psychology & the Other Conference is a yearly convening that aims to revitalize psychology by bringing it into dialogue with philosophy, theology, and other humanities rich traditions. Since its inception in 2011, the Conference has served to gather under a single intellectual roof perspectives that had heretofore been largely isolated from one another. Attended by clinicians, academic psychologists, philosophers, theologians, historians, poets, anthropologists, and cultural theorists, this community attempts to foster new and emergent ways of speaking to human identity, suffering, and potential in order to better serve the call of the suffering Other. One of the distinctive features of the conference is the intentional pairing of plenary speakers with persons from different disciplines to create a type of catalytic engagement that upsets the insularity and jargon-laden fixtures that often come to determine the currency of exchange at discipline-specific conferences.

Learn about our upcoming conferences