David Wall Rice

David Wall Rice is Department Chair and Associate Professor of Psychology at Morehouse College. He is also Principal Investigator of the Identity Orchestration Research Lab (IORL). IORL explores expressions of identity balance through engagement, the exploration of varied contexts and personal narratives. It is a strengths-based lab that works to understand and to elicit behavioral bests.

David is founding Co-Director of Morehouse College’s Cinema, Television, and Emerging Media Studies (CTEMS) Program. Here he has helped to developed curriculum and advises students across disciplines in the utility and application of modern media, specifically in the area of narrative construction.

David graduated from Morehouse with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Psychology and earned a Doctorate in Personality Psychology from Howard University. With a Masters degree in Journalism from Columbia University, David frequently applies his research to cultural criticism. He serves on the Editorial Advisory Board for The Journal of Popular Culture, and has provided commentary for NPR, PRI, CBS News, MSNBC, CNN and his writings have appeared in The Washington Post, The Dallas Morning News, Vibe magazine, The Source, Ebony.com and The Root among other media outlets.

David’s research in Personality Psychology is sharply focused on identity and self constructs. This is demonstrated in his book Balance: Advancing identity theory by engaging the Black male adolescent and the text-in-progress Visible Man: Identity and the psychology of hip-hop narratives. David’s current research attends to Black identity within the recast social context of the “Obama Era” and the psychology of strength as informed by study in Ghana, Israel and Haiti.