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Exploring the boundaries Photo: Ron Hewson Christopher Burris, who recently joined the Psychology department at the College, says that St. Jerome's is the ideal place for him. "I've always tended to be interested in those things that are a little bit bizarre," he says. "St. Jerome's has given me the opportunity to teach unusual--and in my opinion, very fun--things. It's implicit in the identity of St. Jerome's to see itself as an alternative to, for example, what might be found on main campus." One of the unusual things Burris will be teaching is a senior seminar on psychological defense mechanisms. "It's an age-old Freudian idea, that we have ways of dealing with threats to the self," says Burris. "A lot of people have tried to debunk this idea, but there are other people who are trying to test some of the implications of this idea in the lab. I'm very interested in trying to integrate lab-based research into the literature on defense mechanisms. If defense mechanisms are a defensible idea or concept, can we actually find hard laboratory evidence for them?" And next year, Burris hopes to teach a course on the psychology of evil. "It's still fairly hazy, it hasn't quite taken form yet," he admits. "But I think my background gives me a fairly broad foundation to look at the phenomenon of evil. My background in social psychology has given me some sense of how the individual and the group relate to each other and looks at things like aggression and obedience and conformity. Clinical or counselling psychology has given me a sense of so-called abnormal behaviours and variations, including things like sadism and anti-social personality. And my background in the psychology of religion has given me a sense of things like mystical states, possession states. "This is going to be a difficult course," Burris says, "because shockingly enough, there's not a lot of literature out there in mainstream psychology, not a lot of lab-based investigations of the phenomenon of evil, even though there are pockets here and there. Again, I'd like to integrate the lab-based findings as much as possible with some of the broader writings within psychology and within various world religious traditions as well. The fact, for example, that different religious traditions have different conceptions of evil and different prescriptions or approaches for addressing evil have psychological implications as well." Burris has been teaching in a variety of contexts for ten years now. He began teaching at Grace College in Indiana while he was working on his MA at nearby Ball State University. His first experience in the classroom marked a turning point in his career. "It was my intention to go in the direction of counselling at the time," he recalls, "but when I walked into the classroom it clicked that teaching was what I was best suited--and certainly most wanted--to do." Instead of doing a PhD in counselling, as he had planned, he did a PhD in social psychology at the University of Kansas, Lawrence. The title of his dissertation was "Effect of Marginalization on Religious Group Identification among the Intrinsically Religious." Burris continues to explore the margins, the edges of things, in both his teaching and his research. "If I can point to any one theme or any single idea that has really captured my attention lately it's this idea of boundaries," he says. "I think that how humans deal with boundaries is the underlying thread between my various interests right now." One of the many research projects he's engaged in at present, for example, explores the subtle differences between Canadians and Americans in terms of national identity, how that links to self image, how they feel about themselves and their countries. "It's really fascinating," Burris says. "On the surface, many things seem similar, but you go underneath and there's a very different concept of national identity, and that has real implications for how people feel about themselves." Burris, who is from the United States, knows first-hand about subtle differences between Canadians and Americans. His wife, whom he met at a conference for the scientific study of religion while she was working on her MA at Wilfrid Laurier, is from London, Ontario. For a time, they weren't sure which country they'd settle in. Burris was applying for jobs in both Canada and the States while his wife was working on her dissertation at Western. "It was a toss-up," he says. "We didn't know which person needed to go where." They moved to the Waterloo area at the end of August, just before Burris began teaching at the College. "We're finally beginning to get settled now," he says. "There's not a lot of literature out there in mainstream psychology, not a lot of lab-based investigations of the phenomenon of evil" Christopher Burris, the newest faculty member in the Department of Psychology at the College, is drawn to things that are "somewhat off the mainstream."