While a member of other APA divisions and professional organizations, Division 24 is my professional home and I am committed to honoring the past and promoting our future. I am interested in emphasizing the practical ramifications of theoretical work and I believe this can be done by re-establishing the links between the personal and praxis.

I am a Professor of Counseling Psychology at Montana State University. Since high school I have been interested in cultural meaning systems, understandings of personhood, and the nature of healing. I first pursued these interests at the University of Michigan and then continued exploring them in graduate school at Harvard and the University of Texas. As a professor at the University of Guam I began research with traditional healers in Southeast Asia. My publications include articles on how individualistic cultural presuppositions influence psychology as well as on alternative models of the self, personality and moral development, and culture based on philosophical hermeneutics and interactivism. I recently co-edited forthcoming special issues of JTPP on cultural theorizing and Theory & Psychology on positive psychology. I was a Member-at-Large of Division 24, and have been Division Liaison, Cluster Representative, and 2005 APA Convention program chair. I was awarded the Sigmund Koch Award in 2003.

Another interest of mine is the application of mindfulness to counselor training. My graduate class "Mind/Body Medicine and the Art of Self-Care" was recently featured in Counseling Today, the magazine of the American Counseling Association, and has been a source of qualitative research.

Secretary Treasurer

Amy Fisher Smith

Amy Fisher Smith joined the University of Dallas in 2001 and is an Associate Professor in the Psychology Department. Her training is in clinical psychology and she is a licensed psychologist. Her research and scholarly interests include the critical examination of material reductionist trends in psychotherapy, the role of values in psychotherapy, multicultural psychology, and more recently, the role of contemporary psychology to holocaust studies and comparative genocide. She has a long affiliation with Division 24, having served as co-program chair and Member-at-Large for the division. She is committed to an integrated view that includes psychology and philosophy and would be happy to serve the Division in the role of Secretary/Treasurer.

Steve Harrist

Steve Harrist is an associate professor and associate head of the School of Applied Health and Educational Psychology at Oklahoma State University. His Ph.D. is in clinical psychology from the University of Tennessee. He received the Regents Distinguished Teaching Award in 2004 and was named the Hyle Family Endowed Professor in K-20 Leadership in 2008. He helped develop and co-directs the OSU Leadership Minor. He developed and teaches International Perspectives in Ethics and Leadership and Foundations of Ethical Leadership for the minor program; he developed and taught Ethical Theory and Leadership Praxis in Britain at Magdalene College, University of Cambridge for the OSU Scholar Development Program in 2008. His scholarly interests include philosophical psychology, ethical theory, and narrative. He has been a reviewer for the Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology and for APA Division 24 and has presented at Division 24 meetings. He has published in Theory & Psychology, Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, Journal of Research in Personality, and Forum on Public Policy.

Member-at-Large

Michael Tissaw

Michael A. Tissaw is Assistant Professor of Psychology at SUNY Potsdam, where he teaches courses on research methods, human development, and philosophical psychology. He earned his A.B. in Philosophy at Duke University and Ph.D. in General Psychology at Georgetown University, with emphasis on the application of methods of philosophical analysis to theorizing and research in psychology. He is the Division 24 Program Chair for the 2009 convention and he has served previously on the division's convention proposal review committee. His publishing and presentation record includes co-guest-editing a special issue of Theory & Psychology (with Lisa Osbeck), a co-authored book on Wittgenstein (with Rom Harré), a forthcoming contribution to a special issue of New Ideas in Psychology, serving as symposium chair at a conference of the International Society for Theoretical Psychology, and presenting at APA and other conferences and meetings. Also, he has served as ad hoc reviewer for History of the Human Sciences, Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, and Theory & Psychology. If elected, he intends to continue his predecessors' efforts to recruit graduate and undergraduate students into the division and enhance the division's profile. He believes strongly that such efforts should include a cross-disciplinary approach, particularly at the undergraduate level.

Mark Bickhard

My graduate training focused on research methodology and clinical psychology, but, starting at least with (actually, before) a theoretical dissertation, my career has been focused in theoretical and philosophical domains for over thirty years: I have a strong commitment to theoretical and philosophical psychology. A primary interest has been in models of the ontology of psychological phenomena, such as representation and cognition, learning, emotions, reflexive consciousness, language, and so on, and I have published well over a hundred books, chapters, and articles attempting to address such phenomena. A current project is a book with the tentative title of The Whole Person: the draft is now over 800 pages and growing (people are complex!). I organize a biennial workshop on the model involved in this work: the Interactivist Summer Institute. We are planning for the fifth of these in June 2009 in Vancouver. I am editor of New Ideas in Psychology, a journal that has been open to wide ranges of work in theoretical and philosophical psychology since the early 1980s, and my current position is as the Henry R. Luce Professor of Cognitive Robotics and the Philosophy of Knowledge at Lehigh University.