Prior to arriving in Northwest Arkansas, Dr. Kevin Simpson taught for 12 years in Portland, Oregon and briefly, in the wilds of rural Utah immediately after completing graduate school in counseling psychology at the University of Denver. His background and training in psychotherapy also required a full year clinical internship at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. He holds memberships in the American Psychological Association, the Psi Chi Honor Society in Psychology, and Division 2 of the APA, the Teaching of Psychology.
Dr. Simpson considers it a privilege to teach courses in Social, Personality, and Abnormal Psychology; Counseling Theory; the Psychology and History of the Holocaust; Sport and Exercise Psychology; and the Integration of Faith and Psychology. His most recent publications have been on the teaching the psychology of genocide, genius and creativity, and the use of classic and modern propaganda in the teaching of social psychology. He also writes for outdoor magazines on the application of visualization and imagery principles in sport psychology to hunting and shooting pursuits.
Dr. Simpson has been a research fellow twice at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (2009, 2010) and a fellow in the 2011 Summer Institute on the Holocaust and Jewish Civilization at Northwestern University (Illinois). His other professional interest areas include college student development, HIV/AIDS outreach, and international education. Dr. Simpson’s academic work has also taken him to Scotland, Germany, Mexico, Poland and Austria. For the Fall 2011 semester, he taught on the genocidal legacy of National Socialism as part of a study abroad program in Vienna, Austria.
Dr. Simpson has been recognized for his teaching by student groups, receiving ‘favorite faculty’ awards at his previous two universities. And for several summers, Dr Simpson served as a guest faculty in a summer college preparatory program at Yale University where he taught a seminar entitled “Beautiful Minds”: Psychology revealed through exceptional lives. This seminar was also offered as part of a faculty-in-residence experience in a study abroad program in London, England in 2007.
During the summer of 2012, he presented at the 8th International Conference on Holocaust Education at the International School for Holocaust Studies at Yad Vashem Memorial and Museum in Jerusalem, Israel. His lecture, “Creating the Jewish Enemy: Psychology Explains Nazi Propaganda and Perpetration”, advanced a long-held desire for his students to recognize their own vulnerability to being passive, indifferent bystanders to discrimination and, in worst of times, genocide.
In 2016, Dr. Simpson finished his first book, an examination of soccer during the Holocaust, titled Soccer under the Swastika (Rowman & Littlefield). Relying on long-forgotten memoirs and testimonies, his book reveals the surprisingly powerful role soccer played during World War II. From the earliest days of the Nazi dictatorship, captives played soccer behind the walls and fences of the Nazi terror state. To these prisoners, the ‘beautiful game’ was a glimmer of joy amid unrelenting hunger and torture, a show of resistance against the most heinous regime the world had ever seen.
But his true passions in life include his Texan wife, Stefanie, their two children Grace and Eli, playing soccer, upland bird hunting, and reveling in the ongoing successes of Manchester United football club.
