Cathy Riessman’s research examines interrupted lives, where events have disrupted expectations of continuity. Over a long career she has studied and compared the narrative accounts that women and men develop to make sense of biographical disruptions (chronic illness, divorce, and infertility). She examines personal accounts as stories that can illuminate the social sources of "private troubles" by drawing connections between biography and society, revealing how identities are constructed narratively. Her research builds on and extends recent interdisciplinary developments, and the burgeoning field of narrative theory in the social sciences and humanities.
Riessman has authored three books and numerous articles and book chapters. She teaches frequently in the European Union as a specialist in qualitative research methods, and she has published extensively on narrative approaches. A new book, Narrative Methods for the Human Sciences, will appear in 2006, published by Sage. Another book, Looking Back: Narratives of Interrupted Lives, is in preparation. It examines personal narratives Riessman collected, analyzed and published in the past in light of changes in the social world, developments in gender and narrative theory and the author's biography. Reflexivity and emotions—absent from the earlier work—are central to re-interpretation of four case studies.
At Boston College, Riessman teaches an interdisciplinary graduate seminar, Narrative Methods in the Social Sciences. A medical sociologist, she has also taught Health, Gender and the Body in alternate years. During the 2006-7 academic year, she will serve as Visiting Professor at Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia.