Professor Michael Billig FBA

Michael Billig was an undergraduate and postgraduate student at the University of Bristol; he was fortunate to have been supervised by the great social psychologist, Henri Tajfel. Initially Billig followed Tajfel into experimental work, but soon he started to explore other ways of investigating social psychological issues. He has published books on a wide variety of topics: fascism; nationalism; rhetoric and thinking; the royal family and ordinary families; Freud and the theory of repression; 18th-century theories of mind; political commemoration; theories of humour; and the history of rock 'n' roll. Recently, he has examined why academic social scientists write badly; and he has written a book arguing that psychologists need to use more examples and less theory.