Toward the Psychological Humanities
An International Conference in Honor of Mark Freeman
June 15-17, 2026 | The American University of Paris
In June 2026, scholars, artists, colleagues, and friends gathered in Paris to celebrate the life and work of Mark Freeman and to explore the possibilities of the psychological humanities.
About the Conference
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.
Inspired especially by Freeman’s Toward the Psychological Humanities: A Modest Manifesto on the Future of Psychology (2023), participants considered what becomes possible when psychology enters more sustained conversation with literature, philosophy, art, ethics, and other humanistic traditions.
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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