Marie-Cécile Bertau, Ph.D.

Professor of Psychology
School of Social Sciences College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences

678-839-0616
mbertau@westga.HDBedu

Melson Hall - Room 216
Office Hours
Monday, 11:00 am - 1:00 pm

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Marie-Cécile Bertau, Ph.D.

Marie-Cécile Bertau, PhD, until 2016 researcher at the Ludwig-Maximilians Universität München (Germany); PhD in psycholinguistics with a dissertation on Metaphors, subsequently Habilitation developing a speaking-and-thinking theory in the framework of cultural-historical and dialogical psychologies, Address, response, and understanding. Elements of an alterity-based psycholinguistics (2011).

Since fall 2016, Department/Program of Psychology at the University of West Georgia, USA

From August 2018 to May 2023 Director of the PhD Program

Scientific Affiliations

  • Member of the International Society for Theoretical Psychology (ISTP); member-at-large to the executive committee since September 2019
  • Editorial Board Member to the peer-reviewed journals Theory & Psychology; International Review of Theoretical Psychologies (IRTP)
  • Member of Division 24, Society for Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, and of Division 5, Quantitative and Qualitative Methods at APA (American Psychological Association)
  • Member of the Helmuth Plessner Society (HPG: Helmuth Plessner Gesellschaft).
  • Member of the International Society for Dialogical Science (ISDS)
  • Affiliated member to the Centre for Cultural Psychology at Aalborg University, Aalborg (Denmark)
  • Affiliated Researcher to the Graduate Program at the University Alberto Hurtado, Santiago de Chile (Chile)
  • Invited Associate of the TAOS Institute (USA, Europe)
  • Constant relations to numerous scholars in Europe, Canada and South America.

 

Publications

More than 60 peer-reviewed articles and chapters in three languages (English, German, and French), and contributions to main handbooks addressing a large field in psychology: dialogical self theory, cultural-historical psychology, theoretical psychology, identity research. (Request the complete list of Publications, or go to complete CV)

Fields and interests of research:

The language psychological research I pursue addresses language beyond its mainstream cognitive framework largely committed to methodological individualism. Alternatively, I articulate and elaborate the epistemological framework of dialogism to understand the psychological workings and effects of language in human life and consciousness.

My approach is thus decisively pragmatic and dialogic, it encompasses both interpsychological and intrapsychological language activities. Drawing from pragmatic (Karl Bühler) as well as dialogic language theories (Jakubinskij, Vološinov, Bakhtin), cultural-historical theory (Vygotsky), and dialogical psychologies, my aim is to construct a dialogic language theory that translates into a specific research practice and that includes the elaboration of methodologies which are faithful to the unfolding language activity.

Investigating different forms of how humans live with language, I address being in dialogue with others, speaking to oneself while thinking, reading, or writing; key is experiencing others’ and one’s own voice – it is living language.

 

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Fall 2020 Sections

Works on Voices

My core research topic is voice that I understand as a psycho-physical event, a phenomenon unfolding in the social as well as in the individual experience: it is symbolic and embodied, lived and experienced in all verbal activities (speaking, listening, thinking in language, reading, writing). I work theoretically on the notion of voice, including terms such as polyphony, cultural/collective versus individual voice, and heteroglossia. I am elaborating a Dialogical Voice Analysis, i.e. a qualitative method of voice analysis that is as faithful as possible to unfolding voices of selves in dialogue with others and with themselves. Please request information about my works on voice through presentations, keynotes, organized symposia, and publications.