Fellows

Patrick Filipe Conway is the Inaugural Ignacio Chair and Director of the Boston College Prison Education Program. He earned his PhD in Education from Boston College’s Lynch School of Education and Human Development. His research and practice focus on the transformative potential of higher education in prison, exploring the intersections of justice, education, and the humanities, with particular attention to policy and media narratives, effective teaching practices, and the lived experiences of incarcerated students. His scholarship has appeared in the Review of Higher Education, the Harvard Educational Review, Higher Education, Educational Policy, and the Journal of College Student Development, among other journals. Through both practice and scholarship, Dr. Conway seeks to advance the field of higher education in prison, actively collaborating with national initiatives including the Bard Prison Initiative, the Jesuit Prison Education Network, Jobs for the Future, and the Alliance for Higher Education in Prison. His work emphasizes the role of the humanities in understanding justice, supporting reentry, and shaping educational and societal transformatio

Mark Freeman, Distinguished Professor of Ethics and Society Emeritus, Psychology, at the College of the Holy Cross, is currently Senior Fellow at the Center for Psychological Humanities and Ethics at Boston College. Author of Rewriting the Self: History, Memory, Narrative; Hindsight: The Promise and Peril of Looking Backward; The Priority of the Other: Thinking and Living Beyond the Self; Do I Look at You with Love? Reimagining the Story of Dementia; and, most recently, Toward the Psychological Humanities: A Modest Manifesto for the Future of Psychology, he is also Editor for the Oxford University Press series “Explorations in Narrative Psychology.”

Sheldon George is Professor of Africana studies at UMass Boston and a Fellow at the Center for Psychological Humanities and Ethics at Boston College. George is a graduate of the English Ph.D. program at Boston College and has been an active part of the Center’s Psychology and the Other conference since its inception.  George delivered a plenary address at the conference in 2019, moderated the 2025 keynote by Hortense Spillers, and served as respondent to the 2025 plenary by Todd McGowan and the 2021 keynote by Homi K. Bhabha.

Sheldon George is a scholar of American and African American literature and culture whose books have focused on Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, narrative theory, and global black women writers. He is author of Trauma and Race: A Lacanian Study of African American Racial Identity (2016), which has been called by scholars “The most important book on psychoanalysis and race in the twenty-first century” and a book that "changed the landscape of thinking about racism.” George is coeditor, with Jean Wyatt, of two collections on diasporic Black women writers, race, and narrative theory: Reading Contemporary Black British and African American Women Writers: Race, Ethics, Narrative Form (2019) and Experimental Subjectivities in Global Black Women's Writing: Race and Narrative Innovation (2024). George is also coeditor, with Derek Hook, of the landmark collection Lacan and Race: Racism, Identity and Psychoanalytic Theory (2021). Published through the Center’s Psychology and the Other book series, the collection is the first to root itself in a direct rethinking of race through Lacanian theory and an active remaking of Lacanian theory through race.

Sheldon George became a Fellow at the Center for Psychological Humanities in 2024. In other academic appointments, he has served variously as Director of Graduate English, Chair of the Department of Literature & Writing, and Director of General Education. He is the recipient of teaching awards at the graduate and undergraduate levels. George is an Associate Editor of the journal Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society and former chair of the MLA Executive Committee for the forum Psychology, Psychoanalysis and Literature. Sheldon George holds the position of Extraordinary Professor of English at the University of Pretoria, South Africa.

Derek Hook is a Professor in Psychology and a clinical supervisor at Duquesne University. A scholar and practitioner of psychoanalysis, he is one of the editors (along with Calum Neill) of the Palgrave Lacan Series and of the four-volume Reading Lacan's Ecrits (with Calum Neill and Stijn Vanheule). He began his analytical training in London, at the Center for Freudian Analysis and Research and completed an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of London (Birkbeck College) in 2014. He is the author of Six Moments in Lacan (2016), Fanon, Psychoanalysis and Decolonial Psychology (2025) and the co-editor (with Leswin Laubscher and Miraj Desai) of Fanon, Phenomenology and Psychology (2023), in addition to many papers on various facets of the clinical and cultural dimensions of Lacanian Psychoanalysis and Fanon’s psychology. He maintains a YouTube channel with many lectures on Lacanian Psychoanalysis.

Richard Kearney holds the Charles B. Seelig Chair of Philosophy at Boston College and formerly served as Professor at University College Dublin, the Sorbonne, and the University of Nice.

He is the author of 27 books of European philosophy and literature (including three novels and a volume of poetry) and has edited 23 more. His books have been translated into 21 languages. He has received graduate degrees from McGill University, The National University of Ireland, and The University of Paris, as well as several honorary degrees.

He was formerly a member of the Arts Council of Ireland, the Higher Education Authority of Ireland and chairman of the Irish School of Film at University College Dublin. He is currently a member of the Royal Irish Academy and received the Research Ireland Medal for distinguished international scholarship in 2025.

As a public intellectual, he presented numerous series on culture and philosophy for Irish and British radio and television, and broadcast extensively on the European and international media (France Culture, ABC, CBC, NPR).

Kyleigh Leddy’s writing has appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine, and Parents, among others. In 2023, she was named on the Forbes 30 Under 30 Media list. She holds a BA from Boston College, an MSW from Columbia University, and an MFA in Fiction from Bennington Writing Seminars. She is a licensed therapist and teaches at Boston College’s M.A. in Creative Writing program. She is the author of The Perfect Other: A Memoir of My Sister (HarperCollins), which is based on her award-winning New York Times Modern Love essay. Worse Than Strangers (Simon & Schuster) is her debut novel. Her academic work centers around the connection between psychology and writing.

Zenobia Morrill is a psychologist and psychotherapy researcher whose work focuses on psychotherapy process, qualitative and mixed-method inquiry, and critical-liberation psychologies with attention to structural violence, global mental health, and the philosophy of psychology. Recent publications include “Critical-Liberation Psychotherapy” (American Psychologist, 2025, with Lillian Comas-Díaz), an international set of recommendations to broaden evidence for clinical guidance (American Psychologist, 2025, with Levitt et al.), a metamethod analysis in Psychotherapy Research (2025), and work on feminist-liberation psychotherapy in Women & Therapy (2024). Morrill’s work considers the hazards of uncritically adopting well-intended trauma-informed language in services, and how liberation-focused, relational practice can reframe power, risk, and care in clinical and community settings.

Brent Dean Robbins, Ph.D., is a professor of psychology and director of the Psy.D. in Clinical Psychology at Point Park University. Over the years, Dr. Robbins has served in various leadership roles at the University, including chair of the Department of Psychology, program director of the M.A. in Community Psychology, undergraduate coordinator for the B.A. in Psychology, chair of the Graduate Programs Committee, chair of the Core Outcomes Assessment Committee, and chair of the Internal Review Board (IRB).

He is a fellow of the American Psychological Association and past president of the Society for Humanistic Psychology (Division 32 of APA). He has served on the Board of the Society for General Psychology (Division 1 of APA) and the Society for Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology (Division 24 of APA), and he is an active member of the Society for Personality & Social Psychology (Division 8 of APA) and the Society for the Psychology of Religion & Spirituality (Division 36 of APA). He also serves on the editorial board of various peer-reviewed academic journals, including Journal of Humanistic Psychology, The Humanistic Psychologist, Qualitative Psychology, Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology, Integratus and International Journal of Transpersonal Studies. He is co-founder and editor-in-chief of the interdisciplinary journal, Janus Head, and an author of The Medicalized Body and Anesthetic Culture: The Cadaver, the Memorial Body and the Recovery of Lived Experience (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). He is also a fellow of the Beatrice Institute.

Dr. Robbins' areas of expertise include, for example, humanistic, existential and interpersonal approaches to psychotherapy and diagnosis, the phenomenology of emotion and embodiment, coping with death and dying, neurophenomenology, enactive cognition, metabletic phenomenology, cultural therapeutics, mindfulness, mystical and religious experiences, indigenous psychologies, the cultural history of mental illness, resiliency, virtue theory, human dignity, objectification of women and nature, psychology of non-violence and scapegoat theory.