Psychology professor Phillip Hammack wins early career award

UC Santa Cruz associate professor of psychology Phillip Hammack is one of two winners of the 2013 Erik Erikson Early Career Award from the International Society of Political Psychology.

The award is given to a scholar who is within the first decade of receiving their Ph.D. to mark the promise and initiative of early career achievements. Also winning is Daphna Canetti, an associate professor at the School of Political Science, University of Haifa. The award was presented in Israel last month.

Both Hammack and Canetti have written of the daily lives of Israelis and Palestinians.
Hammack's focus has been on young people's feelings of identity. He is the author of Narrative and the Politics of Identity: The Cultural Psychology of Israeli and Palestinian Youth and has a co-edited volume on sexual identities.
 
In presenting the award, the group's president, Stanley Feldman of the State University of New York, Stony Brook, said in that the years since Hammack completed his doctorate, he "has established himself as a leading innovator and highly accomplished scholar in the field of social and political identities, notably as they have been explored through narrative analysis. His work is at the forefront of both theoretical and methodological innovation in political psychology."

Erik Erikson was a development psychologist and psychoanalyst known for his theories on the psychologies of identity. He is recognized as the father of psychosocial development. Erikson was born in Frankfurt, Germany in 1902 and taught at Harvard and UC Berkeley. He died in 1994 at age 91. The award was first given in 1982.