Prf Peter Hegarty

Professional biography

Peter Hegarty is a social psychologist and historian of psychology whose interests cluster around sexuality and gender, cognition and language. He studied at Trinity College Dublin and Stanford University and worked at the City University of New York, Yale University, the University of Surrey, the University of Michigan and Université Libre de Bruxelles prior to joining the Open University in 2020. Details of his latest work are on his Google Scholar profile, his oral history is available at Psychology’s Feminist Voices, and videos featuring Peter are collated on his YouTube channel. 

Research interests

Peter’s research interests are broad ranging. In social psychology, he has researched how markers of social status - such as gender, ‘race’ and sexuality - bias scientific thinking about group differences and the development of research hypotheses. He has also examined the relationship between essentialist thinking and prejudice, considering both the psychology of those who stereotype and those targeted by stereotypes. He investigated the drawing and interpretation of gender difference graphs as ways as a way to evidence how embodied cognition impacts scientific reasoning.

Peter is the author of three books on the history of psychology; 

Gentlemen’s Disagreement: Alfred Kinsey, Lewis Terman, and the Sexual Politics of Smart Men (University of Chicago, 2013), 

A Recent History of Lesbian and Gay Psychology: From Homophobia to LGBT (Routledge, 2017). Winner of the distniguished book award from Division 44 of the American Psychological Association (2018).

A Feminist Companion to Conceptual and Historical Issues in Psychology (CHIP)  co-authored with Katherine Hubbard (Open University Press, 2024).

Peter was an associate editor of the 2022 Oxford Encyclopedia of the History of Modern Psychology, Volumes I-IV (pp. 1-2218), and has guest edited/co-edited special issues and features in the journals American Psychologist, Feminism & Psychology, History of Psychology, Memory Studies, Psychology & Sexuality, and Psychology of Sexualities Review. 

Peter has long been active in the emerging field of intersex studies. Peter was part of the SENS collaboration, who used qualitative methods to describe how young people and their parents & healthcare professionals make sense of diverse sex development. He supervised the Wellcome Trust University Award Intersex UK: A History for the Age of Consensus at the University of Surrey (2015-2020) and co-organized the 2016 conference After the Recognition of Intersex Human Rights, as part of that project. Peter has used focus groups, surveys and experiments to map public understanding of intersex in the UK and the USA. He recently collaborated with Sam Vaughan to critically examine how market-leading psychology textbooks teach psychology students  about intersex variations. He currently chairs the steering group of the professional group PSI- I (Psychosocial Studies Intersex - International), and serves both on the American Psychological Association's Task Force on Differences of Sex Development, and on the Executive Committee of the UK Charity Icon UK.​

Teaching interests

Peter leads the Qualification MSc in Psychology (Conversion) and has been involved in the production of its first module Critically Exploring Psychology 1. Whilst he was co-director of the Open Psychology Research Centre from 2020-2024 he lead the development of the OPRC Collaboration Laboratory (ColLab). 

Peter has supervised or co-supervised fifteen PhD dissertations in Psychology, and has co-published with all of his past Phd students. He received the 2017 BPS Award for Promoting Equality of Opportunity in Psychology in recognition of his work in supporting diverse early career researchers in Psychology.  He developed and co-directed the University of Michigan  International Summer Institutes in LGBT Psychology (2008-2010), which was the largest training institute for early career researchers in LGBT psychology in the world. In 2020 he directed the European Association of Social Psychology Summer School during the COVID-19 pandemic,   He lead the career development  planning of fifteen PhD fellows in the European Training Network G-VERSITY (2020-2024). His current PhD students are Marie Lou Nussbaum (University of Berne, Switzerland), and Shannon O' Rourke (Open University, UK). 

External collaborations

Peter has a long history of service to the field. He is a past associate editor of the European Journal of Social Psychology Social and Personality Psychology Compass, and British Journal of Social Psychology. In 2004, he was the first person to be elected to chair the BPS Psychology of Sexualities Section.  He was a contributing author to the 2012 BPS Guidelines for Therapeutic Treatment of Sexual and Gender Minority Clients. Peter has spoken at the London Science Museum, the Cheltenham Literary and Science Festivals, the Surrey History Centre, the Sick! Festival, the Institute for Historical Research, the Royal Society of Medicine, and at events organized by the Ozanne Foundation, In 2021, he was invited to speak on LGBTQ history on the APA podcast series Speaking of Psychology. He is currently on the advisory committee of the British Psychological Society's History of Psychology Centre.