William McKinley Runyan, PhD, is a Professor in the School of Social
Welfare, and a research psychologist at the institute of Personality and
Social Research of the University of California, Berkeley. He received his
PhD in clinical psychology and public practice from Harvard University in
1975 and has been a professor at the University of California, Berkeley
since 1979.
Runyan is the author of Life Histories and Psychobiography: Explorations
in Theory and Method (1982) and editor and coauthor of Psychology and
Historical Interpretation (1988). With Gardner Lindzey he co-edited A
History of Psychology in Autobiography, Vol. IX, 2007. This contained
autobiographies by Elliot Aronson, Albert Bandura, Jerome Kagan, Daniel
Kahneman, Elizabeth Loftus, Walter Mischel and others. Runyan reviewed the
history of the study of lives in the Handbook of Psychobiography (2005). His
intellectual autobiography is sketched in "From the Study of Lives and
Psychohistory to Historicizing Psychology: A Conceptual Journey" (2003).
