Psychology professor awarded prestigious Spencer fellowship

Phillip L. Hammack, assistant professor of psychology at UC Santa Cruz, has been named a 2011-2012 National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow.

He is one of 20 fellows selected from a competitive pool of 170 applicants. The fellowship will help with salary replacement and research expenses for up to two years.

Hammack joined UCSC in 2007 and is the author of Narrative and the Politics of Identity: The Cultural Psychology of Israeli and Palestinian Youth (Oxford University Press, 2011).  He has held a number of non-academic positions in peace organizations, including roles in group facilitation and program administration in peace education programs.

From 2010 until just recently, he was a visiting fellow at the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. His research broadly investigates youth identity development in a political and cultural context.
 
The fellowships are administered by the National Academy of Education and are funded by a grant from the Spencer Foundation.  Now in its 25th year, the fellowship program has more than 600 alumni who include many of the strongest education researchers in the field today.