One Year In: Reflections on Teaching, Research, and Writing at the Intersection of Psychology and True Crime

It's Officially Summer (Sort Of)

Welcome back, and welcome to what is technically the first week of my summer. I say "technically" because anyone who knows academics knows that summer is rarely a true break, but more of a reallocation of chaos. Still, grades are in, commencement ceremonies are done, and for the moment I am allowing myself to feel something resembling relief. This post is both a general update and a bit of a milestone marker, so bear with me as I get into all of it.

The academic year just wrapped up, and honestly, it was a lot. I took on more than I should have, teaching too many classes across too many institutions while also juggling research projects and too much other stuff. That said, I feel genuinely good about what we accomplished this year, and I think that matters. Feeling burned out and feeling proud are not mutually exclusive, but I’m trying to be a bit mor reflective about it. (going forward anyway….maybe….)

Commencement Season: Why It Never Gets Old

I always look forward to commencement. I know that might sound like something a professor is supposed to say, but I genuinely mean it. This year I had the privilege of attending two ceremonies, and both were meaningful in different ways.

The first was at the Community College of Rhode Island, which is an institution that is very dear to my heart. I worked there for well over a decade, and continue to now as an adjunct professor. I feel a strong connection to that community and to those students.

One of the things that has changed since I shifted from advising and counseling roles into primarily teaching is that I do not always have students in their final semester anymore. When you are an advisor or a counselor, you tend to walk with students across multiple years. Now that I am mostly teaching 100 and 200 level courses as an adjunct, I’m mostly working with students just starting their journey and rarely see them again (and they likely don’t remember me years later at commencement).

This particular semester, however, I taught a research methods course, which is a fairly advanced class for an associates-level program. Thus, almost all of the students were psychology majors, and the majority were preparing to transfer, many of them to Rhode Island College or URI. So this year was particularly special in that I had five students walking, and I got to see all of them at commencement. That does not happen every year, and I appreciated it. Seeing them at commencement, knowing that the work we did in that research methods classroom was a piece of their foundation going forward, was genuinely moving.

The second ceremony was at Roger Williams University, where I teach graduate students. Watching my graduate students complete their master's degrees is a different kind of pride. Graduate students, especially in applied psychology programs, tend to come in with a lot of self-doubt and leave with a real command of their field. Seeing that transformation is one of the more reinvigorating things about this work. I left that ceremony feeling genuinely excited about what these students are going to do next.

The Research Side of Things: APLS and What Comes Next

In addition to the teaching, this past year involved a significant research push. I presented at the American Psychology-Law Society conference, and it was a great experience. We had two research projects to share, and both represent areas I am genuinely passionate about. As I said earlier, I am planning a dedicated blog post on the research itself, so I will not bury the lead here, but I want to flag it because it feeds directly into what is coming this summer.

The first project is an ongoing investigation into the New England serial killer phenomenon, which sits at a fascinating intersection of forensic psychology, media, and regional history. Serial offending is one of those topics that attracts enormous public interest, and part of what I find compelling about the academic lens is that it allows us to push back against some of the mythology that surrounds these cases. The popular narrative around serial killers is frequently distorted by media representations, and the psychological literature offers a more nuanced and frankly more useful picture. We are hoping to have a solid draft of that paper by the end of summer.

The second project involves female sex offenders and jury perception, which is an area that remains genuinely underexplored in the forensic psychology literature. Research consistently shows that jurors bring a different set of assumptions to cases involving female defendants, particularly when the charges involve sexual offenses, and those assumptions have real consequences for how cases are evaluated and adjudicated. We are planning to begin writing that paper very soon, with the goal of submitting it for publication before the end of summer. That would be a meaningful milestone.

One Year of the Blog

This post also marks something close to the one-year anniversary of this blog and website, and I want to take a moment to reflect on that. When I started this, I was genuinely uncertain whether anyone would read it beyond my immediate circle. Academic writing for public audiences is its own skill set, and bridging the gap between scholarship and accessible communication is something that takes deliberate effort. I have tried to do that here, and based on the feedback I have received, it seems to be landing somewhat.

I have a small but dedicated readership, and only one of them is my mom. Which, for the record, makes my mom objectively cool. She is also a remarkably interesting person in her own right, though I will just say that the FBI once nearly blew up her car and leave it at that for another post.

To everyone who has been reading and not commenting, that is completely fine too. I hope the content has been useful or at least interesting. Forensic psychology is a field that deserves more accessible public writing, and if this blog is doing even a small part of that work, I am happy. I plan to continue it, and I am actively looking for topics to cover, so if there is something in forensic psychology, criminal behavior, or psychology more broadly that you would like me to write about, please send me an email or leave a comment.

The Book: 35,000 Words and Counting

This anniversary also coincides with roughly one year of serious, focused work on the book I have been developing. To give some background: for several years prior, I had been conducting qualitative research with colleagues on the true crime phenomenon itself, examining why people are drawn to it, what it does culturally, and what the academic literature says about the psychology of true crime consumption. That research was always pointing toward a book, but last summer was when I actually sat down and began writing it in earnest.

The fall and spring semesters were, as I mentioned, outrageously busy, and the writing slowed considerably during those months. But I kept at it, and I am pleased to say that I have added approximately four chapters over the past year. My current word count is sitting at around 35,000 words, which is a little more than a third of the way through my proposed length. That is meaningful progress, even if it is slower than I had originally hoped.

The plan for this summer is to finish the final chapter of what I think of as the through-line narrative, and then write the prologue and epilogue, which should be relatively straightforward at this stage since I know the story well (it’s about me!). After that, I am going to turn my attention back to the historical and academic chapters, where the deeper research work lives. If I can get three or four of those done before the fall, I will be more than halfway through the proposed length, and I might start putting the proposal into shape to shop around. That feels like a reasonable and not entirely delusional goal (still intimidating…).

Writing a book is a strange experience. It is one of the few tasks where you cannot fully assess the difficulty until you are already in the middle of it. I am still not sure whether the hardest parts are behind me or ahead of me, and I have made my peace with not knowing. What I do know is that this topic, forensic psychology approached through the lens of true crime, has not been done quite the way I am doing it, and that keeps me motivated even on the slow days. I am taking it one page at a time, and that is about as much of a writing philosophy as I have.

What Is Coming This Summer

So to summarize, here is what the summer looks like from where I am standing: two research papers to write and hopefully submit for publication, three or four book chapters to draft, and a continued commitment to this blog. Somewhere in there I am also hoping the pool will open and the weather will stay warm enough to get to the beach. Hope you get to enjoy the summer too. Thank you for being here, whether you have been following since the beginning or stumbled in recently. This has been a genuinely enjoyable year of writing for an audience, and I am looking forward to the next one. Stay tuned.