Dan P. McAdams is the Henry Wade Rogers Professor of Psychology and Professor of Human Development and Social Policy at Northwestern University, Evanston, IL. In 2022-23, he served as the Interim Dean of Northwestern’s School of Education and Social Policy. He has won numerous awards for teaching and was named a Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence at Northwestern, 1995-98.
Author of over 300 scientific articles and chapters, numerous edited volumes, and 9 books, Professor McAdams works in the areas of personality and life-span developmental psychology. His theoretical and empirical writings focus on concepts of self and identity in contemporary American society and on themes of power, intimacy, redemption, and generativity across the adult life course. Professor McAdams is a leader in the emergence within the social sciences of narrative conceptions of human lives – approaches that place stories and storytelling at the center of human personality. Within personality science, he has pioneered research on narrative identity, which he defines as a person’s internalized and evolving story explaining how they believe they have become the unique person they are becoming. He has examined the origins of narrative identity with the emergence of autobiographical reasoning in adolescence. He has also focused special attention on life stories that track overcoming adversity, persevering in the face of suffering, and related redemptive themes, and has examined how these stories reflect American cultural motifs. McAdams has been funded by major grants from The Spencer Foundation and the Templeton Foundation. From 1997 through 2019, he was funded by the Foley Family Foundation to direct the Foley Center for the Study of Lives at Northwestern University.
Most notably, Professor McAdams is the author of The Redemptive Self: Stories Americans Live By (Oxford University Press, 2006/2013), which won the 2006 William James Award from the American Psychological Association for best general-interest book in psychology, across all subfields, and the 2007 Association of American Publishers Award for excellence in professional and scholarly publishing. He is also the author of The Art and Science of Personality Development (Guilford Press, 2015), and, most recently, The Person: A New Introduction to Personality Psychology (with William Dunlop, Wiley, 2022).
Professor McAdams is the 1989 winner of the Henry A. Murray Award from the American Psychological Association for research on personality and the study of lives, the 2006 Theodore Sarbin Award for contributions to theoretical and philosophical psychology, and the 2012 Jack Block Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology for career contributions to personality psychology. He is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association (Division 8) and the Association for Psychological Science, has served on the Executive Committee of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, and is a founding member of the Association for Research in Personality (ARP), and he served as President of ARP 2016-18. His work has been featured in many national publications and media outlets including the New York Times, the New Yorker, The Atlantic, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Newsweek, and he has appeared on CNN, MSNBC, NPR, and many other television and radio venues.