• About the Life Story Center
• The Director
• The 20th Anniversary Celebration
• The 10th Anniversary Celebration

The Director

Professor Robert Atkinson founded the Life Story Center (the Center for the Study of Lives) in 1988 during his first year at the University of Southern Maine and has been its director since then. His Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania is in cross-cultural human development, and he has master's degrees in both American folk culture (SUNY Cooperstown) and counseling (University of New Hampshire). His bachelor's degree is in philosophy from Southampton College (LIU). He teaches human development and multicultural courses for the counseling, school psychology, and adult education master's degree programs in the Human Resource Development Department. He has been a founding core faculty member in the Russell Scholars Program, director of the USM Sea Program, a summer course based on a schooner sailing the Maine coast, and a faculty member in the Religious Studies minor. His primary interests are in the narrative study of lives, the methodology and interpretation of the life story interview, cultural influences on life span development, and psychospiritual development. He is the author of Remembering 1969: Searching for the Eternal in Changing Times (2008); The Beat of My Drum (2005, with Babatunde Olatunji); The Life Story Interview (1998), The Gift of Stories: Practical and Spiritual Applications of Autobiography, Life Stories and Personal Mythmaking (1995), the co-editor of Celebrating the Lives of Students: The Life Stories of Five Maine Teenagers (USM/CSL, 1990), and the co-author of The Teenage World: Adolescent Self-Image in Ten Countries (Plenum, 1987). He has also written over two dozen articles for many journals, magazines, and encyclopedias, including Audubon, Psychology Today, and Encyclopedia Britannica. His current book project is Sacred Storytelling: Remembering Our Life Story, Leaving Our Spiritual Legacy, due out in 2009.