Professor Angela Maitner’s career has been shaped by movement across borders — academic, cultural, and geographic. Each move has opened new frontiers for asking how people see themselves, one another, and the societies they inhabit.
From the lecture halls of California to the diverse classrooms of Abu Dhabi, her work has traced the hidden forces that guide emotion, shape identity, and define belonging. In a region where dozens of cultures converge, she is uncovering how psychology can capture the complexity of human life in motion.
“I’m American. I grew up in Michigan, then did my undergraduate degree in Florida and my PhD in California. After that, I moved to the UK for a postdoc,” she recalls, sketching out a trajectory that carried her far from the place she began. “I always had an interest in culture, but at the time, it wasn’t deeply integrated into the field of psychology.”
That early curiosity became a defining mission. Social psychology had long focused on how context shapes thoughts, feelings and behavior, but culture itself was often treated as a footnote rather than a central force. Maitner wanted to change that.
She joined NYU Abu Dhabi in 2024 as visiting professor of psychology, bringing her questions into one of the most international universities in the world. “It’s been amazing,” she says. “I got to introduce a course in cultural psychology which had not been offered in the psychology program before. That felt important to me.”
The shift has given her space to continue her own projects while mentoring a new generation of students. “I’m continuing to train students who can make their own contributions to the field and the world,” she says. “I’m also pushing forward with research. Right now, we’re working on a project about the illusion of control across cultures. There’s still so much to learn.”
It is that sense of unfinished business, of questions still waiting to be asked, that drives her. In a region defined by rapid change and diversity, Maitner’s work suggests psychology must also be agile, ready to adapt and able to capture the shifting contours of human life.
“There is a growing interest in psychology in the region and being able to contribute to that growth has been an incredible privilege” she says. “That’s what keeps me motivated.”
Maitner’s contribution to the psychology field in the UAE dates back to 2009 when she helped introduce a psychology major, built a department, and open research labs at American University of Sharjah. “I knew the most influential work I’d do might not be a paper I published, but the training I gave students — helping them become researchers interested in questions meaningful to them and building capacity for the field.”
That training has already borne fruit. “Throughout that time, I had the opportunity to train students, several of whom are now in graduate programs or have completed PhDs,” she says. “That’s incredibly exciting.”
Her studies have challenged tidy assumptions about control and agency across cultures. “Westerners tend to believe they can change the world around them — what’s called primary control,” she explains. “In other parts of the world, people have more of a sense of secondary control, believing outcomes are shaped by fate or the group. In our research, we found that Arab participants endorsed both primary and secondary control, which is a more dialectical way of thinking than the either-or approach common in the West.”
In a place like the UAE, where more than 200 nationalities share space, she found a natural laboratory for studying identity, culture and social dynamics.
The UAE is an incredibly complex place,” she says. “It’s a crossroads of cultures, and that allows you to study identity dynamics, cultural dynamics, and intergroup contact. It’s a rich context to ask so many different questions about humans.
