Katherine Kinzler Named as Deputy Dean for the Division of the Social Sciences

Katherine D. Kinzler, a professor in the Department of Psychology, has agreed to serve as a deputy dean for the Division. 

In that role, she will provide leadership on the division’s strategic initiatives as well as its alumni relations and public engagement portfolio. She will also engage with divisional faculty regarding external review processes and doctoral program connections to the professional schools. She joins Mark Bradley, Kate Cagney, and Mark Hansen in serving as a deputy dean.

Professor Kinzler’s research sits at the intersection of developmental and social psychology. Her work focuses on the origins of prejudice and ingroup/outgroup thinking, with an emphasis on understanding how language and accent mark social groups. She is also interested in food cognition and moral psychology. She joined the faculty of the University of Chicago Department of Psychology in 2008 as a Neubauer Family Assistant Professor and spent 2015-2019 at Cornell University, where she was most recently the Chair of the Department of Psychology. She earned her B.A. at Yale in Cognitive Science and her Ph.D. at Harvard in Psychology. She was a Fulbright Scholar at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. Her research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health and the John Templeton Foundation. Her work has appeared regularly in the New York Times and other media outlets, and she was named a “Young Scientist,” one of 50 scientists under age 40 recognized by the World Economic Forum. Her book, How You Say It: Why you talk the way you do, and what it says about you (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) is forthcoming in Summer 2020. 

Kinzler was appointed to this role by Amanda Woodward, Dean of the Division of the Social Sciences and William S. Gray Distinguished Service Professor of Psychology.  The role is effective October 1, 2019 for a term of three years.