Scholar - Women Also Know History

Participant Info

Keywords: history of psychology, women in the history of psychology, history of developmental psychology, history of religion and psychology, history of science, psychology, religion, gender, Catholicism, science

About Me: Dr. Elissa Rodkey is an Assistant Professor at Crandall University in Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada. She earned her PhD in the History and Theory of Psychology Program at York University. Her master’s thesis research was on Eleanor Gibson and the famous Visual Cliff experiment. Her dissertation featured emotion theorist Magda Arnold, whose mid-career conversion to Catholicism provides an opportunity for analysis of the relationship between psychology and religion at the mid-20th century.

Rodkey uses a feminist framework to analyze the experiences of marginalized psychologists, such as the significance of non-academic networks or communities (e.g. friends, families, and religious groups) for the psychologists’ encouragement and intellectual growth. She also draws on feminist critiques of psychology to illuminate episodes of disciplinary failure, such as the history of unrecognized infant pain and the ethical lapses of the American Psychological Association outlined in the Hoffman Report. Dr. Rodkey is a 2018 Program Co-Chair for the Society for the History of Psychology (Division 26 of the American Psychological Association). Her publications appear in the journals History of Psychology, Canadian Psychology, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, History and Philosophy of Psychology, Psychology of Women Quarterly, and the Journal of Pain.

Recent Publications: Rodkey, E. N. (2017). “Very much in love”: The letters of Magda Arnold and Father John Gasson. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 53, 286-304.

Rodkey, E. N. (2016). Far more than dutiful daughter: Milicent Washburn Shinn’s child study and education advocacy after 1898. The Journal of Genetic Psychology, 177, 209-230.

Rodkey, E. N. (2015). The visual cliff’s forgotten menagerie: Rats, goats, babies, and myth-making in the history of psychology. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 51, 113-140.

Rodkey, E. N. & Pillai Riddell, R. (2013). The infancy of infant pain research: The experimental origins of infant pain denial. Journal of Pain, 14, 338-350.

Gul, P., Korosteliov, A., Caplan, L., Ball, L. C., Bazar, J. L., Rodkey, E. N., Sheese, K., Young, J., & Rutherford, A. (2013). Reconstructing the experiences of first generation women in Canadian psychology. Canadian Psychology, 54, 94-104.

Rodkey, E. N. (2011). Last of the Mohicans? James McCosh and psychology ‘old’ and ‘new.’ History of Psychology, 14, 335-355.