September 5, 2024 | By Nadine Bucca (AGI25)

You might recognize Erica Beall (A07) from our Great Books web and podcast series Continuing the Conversation, in which she discusses the beauty of war in Homer’s Iliad, or maybe you studied alongside her in Annapolis in the not-so-distant past. Her senior essay, “At War 'Twixt Will and Will Not': The Psychology of Politics and Human Justice in 'Measure for Measure,” reflected her fascination with the human mind; she went on to receive her PhD in social psychology from the University of Southern California in 2015 before rejoining her alma mater the same year—this time around, as a faculty member. We spoke with Beall about teaching in the Program, traveling abroad, and why she chose to become a Johnnie not just once, but twice. 

What brought you to St. John’s?

The books, and the possibility of getting to talk to other people about them. As a kid, I loved to read; but I was always finding myself in the unfortunate situation of having no one to talk to about what I was reading. It felt like there was always a conversation brewing in my mind, but rarely an opportunity to have it, so I carried a notebook with me everywhere I went and was constantly writing down thoughts and questions that I would much rather have expressed in conversation, so that I could find out what other people thought.

When it came time to go to college, St. John’s struck me as the best place to go to do what I was always wanting to do: learn from books, and from other people. One other consideration was that I resented the idea of having to declare a major. There wasn’t any area of study—math, science, literature, philosophy, music, politics—that I was willing to give up for the sake of becoming more expert in any particular one of them. I guess the best way to sum it up would be: after 12 years in the American educational system, I felt an urgent need to become broader, not narrower.

What segments are you teaching and what precept are you in (in person or online)? Do you have a preference for one over the other and why?

Right now, I’m teaching in the Politics and Society segment, and my preceptorial is on Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. It’s been a lot of fun to encounter various unexpected ways in which the PI can be brought to bear on the readings in the seminar. I suppose it ought not to be surprising to discover overlap in the questions and concerns taken up by various great books... but in this case, the specific places where the overlap is coming to light have not always been ones I would have anticipated in advance of encountering them.

As far as a preference, I decidedly do not have one, any more than I have a preference for lunch over dinner. When it’s time for lunch, I am just as happy to have my lunch as I am to have dinner, when it’s time for dinner. The same principle applies to my classes, and more generally to the various segments of the program.

Where did you do your Phd? What did you write your thesis on and are you still as passionate about that topic?

I went to graduate school at University of Southern California. My dissertation had to do with the psychological foundations of human sociality and shared experience. I wanted to dig deeply into what it means to experience another individual as “you.” What I mean by that is, the experience of being on one side of a reciprocal self-other relationship, which is fundamentally different from the way we experience, say, an inanimate object; or even in certain perverse circumstances, how one might experience a human being without acknowledging their humanity. I went after this question of what it means to experience a “you” by investigating all sorts of psychological and behavioral phenomena, from eye contact in early infancy, to anthropomorphism. I wanted to know whether anthropomorphism is simply the cognitive act of imposing a social schema on a non-human entity, or whether our sociality extends naturally and spontaneously beyond the strictly demarcated domain of human beings. It was a very rewarding project—it took me everywhere from the psychology lab, to Hegel, to early human art.

I am most certainly still passionate about questions pertaining to human sociality and intersubjectivity, but I tend to approach them differently now. In graduate school, I was able to take it as far as I really wanted to go with approaching these kinds of questions from the standpoint of empirical psychology, and once I was done with the dissertation, I found myself shifting into a more theoretical mode of inquiry. Having looked into the empirical aspect of things, I now take my bearings more from philosophy—especially phenomenology—than from experimental psychology.

You've spent time traveling in China. What brought you there and what did you learn?

What brought me there was four years spent reading, listening to, looking at, and discussing almost nothing that fell outside the products of the Western world. They were four glorious years, but I felt that perhaps I had come out a bit one-sided, so I went to the other side of the world to see what was there. As for what I learned, it would be impossible to capture it all in brief. I learned what China looks, feels, and smells like; I learned how different political systems cultivate different habits of life, speech, and thought; I learned about Tibet (I went there for several weeks, just to wander about); I learned what it’s like not to know your way around; and any number of other things. But for purposes of addressing the question in this context, I’ll just highlight the most general thing: I learned, I think, that there is a human nature.

I was persuaded of this partly by the discovery that human interaction, and even to some extent friendship, does not fully depend on the possibility of expressing one’s thoughts to another person through an exchange of words. There are other meaningful modes of exchange and mutuality that seem to be more primal than discourse, and yet not at all animal in nature (in the sense of being merely instinctive, or appetitive). I became closely bonded to a Chinese friend who spoke almost as little English as I did Chinese—only enough to go about basic tasks like shopping, traveling, meeting new people, and posing very basic questions. My friendship with her was built on shared experiences that didn’t require being able to declare our thoughts and feelings to one another. We had enough language in common to hash out, in mangled accents and limited vocabulary, where and when to meet for a walk through the city; but nowhere near enough for that walk to be an occasion for real conversation; yet, the time we spent together was an entirely satisfying experience of companionship. Having a friendship in which you can’t fall back on language to sustain the connection requires cultivating other ways of being present, other ways of experiencing a shared world.

As a recent graduate of what one esteemed tutor refers to as “a talking college,” it would never have occurred to me, by considering it from a theoretical standpoint, that such a thing was possible. For two people to get to know one another without telling one another all about themselves would have struck me as being, in principle, impossible. It isn’t.

This interview first appeared in the online Graduate Institute Colloquy blog.