About the Current Roesch Chair
Jack Bauer, Ph.D. is an associate professor in the Department of Psychology. As Roesch Chair he is working to facilitate interdisciplinary scholarship and education, particularly on the topic of eudaimonia, or human flourishing.
His specialty areas are personality and developmental psychology. His primary research questions include:
- How do people’s subjective interpretations of life predict how their lives turn out?
- How do people’s goals and values promote the development of meaning and happiness?
- What is a good life? What kinds of progress are worth pursuing?
His research demonstrates how growth narratives in people’s life stories predict meaning and happiness (and other qualities of eudaimonia), even years later. This work has been published in the leading journals of both personality and developmental psychology.
Dr. Bauer is an associate editor of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Research in Personality.
He is the co-editor of the book Transcending Self-Interest: Psychological Explorations of the Quiet Ego (2008), which presents new scientific research on the problems of egotism and the ways and benefits of transcending it.
Dr. Bauer joined the psychology faculty at the University of Dayton in 2006. Before that he was an assistant professor at Northern Arizona University. Prior to that he held a postdoctoral fellowship at Northwestern University. He holds a B.A. in economics from the College of the Holy Cross and a Ph.D. in psychology from the Catholic University of America. Prior to academic life he was a newspaper editor in northern Michigan.
For more information about Professor Bauer’s work: http://academic.udayton.edu/jackbauer/
