Dr. Maryanne Fisher
Congratulations to Dr. Maryanne Fisher, who was chosen to be the guest editor of the January edition of the American Psychological Association’s journal Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences, a special edition which addresses women’s representation in evolutionary-based research and theory.
Dr. Fisher, a professor of Psychology at Saint Mary’s and an affiliate faculty member at the Kinsey Institute, is an evolutionary psychologist whose work explores human relationships through an evolutionary lens.
A well-known expert in her field, her primary research topic is the evolutionary foundations of human interpersonal relationships, female intrasexual competition, and women’s mating strategies. She is also interested in the intersection between feminist studies and evolutionary psychology.
She was thrilled to take on the task of editing the special edition of the journal, a task she has some experience with; she was also the guest editor of the Oxford Handbook of Women and Competition in 2017 and Evolution’s Empress: Darwinian Perspectives on the Nature of Women in 2013.
When speaking about the selection process, Dr. Fisher said it was extremely difficult to narrow down the entries, even removing her own work from the contention.
“We had so many excellent papers submitted, we could have filled two journals,” said Dr. Fisher. “They were very good, very high quality.”
This special issue examines how women have been studied from an evolutionary perspective, and how the discipline both questions assumptions about women and has limited explorations of women and.
“Evolutionary perspectives have often been openly criticized in fields such as women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, to the point of being dismissed outright in favor of sociocultural explanations for behavior, motivation, emotions, and cognitions,” said Dr. Fisher.
“Collectively the articles show that women are not simply passive entities, but instead play significant and active parts in human evolution and theories about evolutionary bases of behavior.”
Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences publishes manuscripts that advance the study of human behavior from an evolutionary perspective, with an emphasis on work that integrates evolutionary theory with other approaches and perspectives from across the behavioral sciences, including the range of subdisciplines within psychology as well as the social sciences (e.g., sociology, political science, criminology) and humanities (e.g., history, literature studies).