Jens Brockmeier

Professor Brockmeier received his degrees in psychology, philosophy, and linguistics/literary theory from the Free University Berlin where he took on, aged 26, his first appointment as assistant professor of epistemology and philosophy of science. He then has held teaching and research appointments at the University of Toronto, The New School New York, and Linacre College Oxford, among others, before joining The American University of Paris in January 2014.

Brockmeier’s research is concerned with the cultural fabric of mind and language. A number of his research projects have dealt with how language works as a form of life and central dimension of human development. In particular, he has been investigating narrative as psychological, linguistic, and cultural form and practice. His main interest here is in the function of narrative for autobiographical memory, personal identity, and the understanding of time: issues he has explored both empirically and philosophically – empirically, in various languages and sociocultural contexts, as developmental phenomena, and under conditions of health and illness; philosophically, in terms of a narrative hermeneutics.

Recent books include Erzählung als Lebensform [Narrative as form of life] (Gießen: Psychosozial-Verlag, 2022); Beyond the Archive: Memory, Narrative, and the Autobiographical Process (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2015; rev. 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).