New School for Social Research Hires New Psychology, Philosophy Faculty Members
The New School for Social Research is known for its world-renowned faculty — leaders in their fields of study who shape public debate, advance academic research, and push the boundaries of social sciences, philosophy, and history around the world.
Now, NSSR’s faculty is becoming even more distinguished with the addition of three new faculty members: Adam Brown, associate professor in the Department of Psychology; Katrina Fincher, assistant professor in the Department of Psychology; and Daniel Rodriguez-Navas, assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy. The faculty members bring a unique, socially engaged approach to their diverse fields of study.
Brown is a clinical psychologist whose research focuses on identifying psychological and biological factors that contribute to negative mental health outcomes following exposure to traumatic stress and developing interventions guided by advances in cognitive neuroscience. A focus of this research is the use of behavioral and brain-imaging techniques to examine the role of memory and self-appraisals in the onset and treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder.
Fincher studies moral psychology. Her research focuses on the basic cognitive and perceptual psychological mechanisms that enable people to live in social groups, in particular three mechanisms that enable this transition; perceptual dehumanization (her primary focus), covert retribution, and sacred values.
Rodriguez-Navas works at the intersection of ethics and the history of philosophy. His interest in ethics lies both on theoretical and meta-theoretical questions about the nature of normativity, and on more concrete questions concerning what many think of as mechanisms of exclusion and what the best strategies for dismantling them might be. His historical interests center around the 19th and 20th-century European tradition.