Molly Andrews is a Reader in the School of Social Sciences, Media and Cultural Studies, at the University of East London, and Co-director of the Centre for Narrative Research (www.uelac.uk/cnr/index.htm). She received her BA in Political Science from Tufts University, her Ed.M. in Moral Psychology from Harvard University, and her PhD in Social Psychology from the University of Cambridge.  Her research interests include the psychological basis of political commitment, psychological challenges posed by societies in times of acute political change, the psychology of patriotism, the politics of remembering, gender and aging, and counter-narratives. Her recent work on the truth commissions of East Germany and South Africa has focussed primarily on the political psychology of forgiveness.

 Molly Andrews is the author of Lifetimes of Commitment: Aging, Politics, Psychology (Cambridge University Press 1991), and the co-editor of Lines of Narrative: Psychosocial Perspectives  (Routledge 2001) and Considering Counter-narratives (John Benjamins 2004). She is currently completing her monograph, Constructing and interpreting the political: Narrative research in the Social Sciences, which will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2006. This book explores the potential contribution of narrative research to the social sciences as a means of identifying and interpreting individuals’ constructions of the political world. The book brings together four case studies (British, American, East German and South African) and examines both the implicit political worldviews which individuals impart through the stories they tell about their lives, as well as the wider social and political context which makes some stories more ‘tell-able’ than others.  Through the use of these case studies, the book addresses the potential and the challenges of the theory and practice of narrating the political world.