Fernando Romero

Fernando Romero is a Clinical Assistant Professor in the Writing Program at NYU Shanghai. Before joining NYU Shanghai, he was Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Relations at Goucher College. He received his PhD in Political Science from the Johns Hopkins University, where he specialized in international and political theory with a marked humanities influence, drawing from philosophy, history, and literature.

His teaching promotes interdisciplinary cross-cultural inquiry and effective communication of ideas. His teaching at NYU Shanghai has been recognized with the Teaching Excellence Award.

His research aims to bridge insights across the sciences and humanities, focusing on how human and non-human complex systems reproduce processes that are both self-organizing and self-destructive in technology, society, markets, and thought. Current research projects include interdisciplinary studies of stupidity and its relation to cognition, inheritance and estate taxation policy discourses and their relation to value systems, and collaborations in maladaptive behavior clinical psychology studies.

Select Publications

• “The Political as Transformative Subjectivity in Lu Xun’s Ah Q.” SocArXiv (2025). doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/8g7s9_v1
• “Clarifying Stupidity: Akrasia, Error, and Creative Thought.” SocArXiv (2025). doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/r3hcg_v1
• “Decoding Stupidity in Nuclear and AI Brinkmanship.” SocArXiv (2025). doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/eamwg_v1
• “Review of What Is a People?” Law, Culture and the Humanities 13, no. 2 (2017): 311–14. doi.org/10.1177/1743872117693344c

Education

• PhD, Political Science
  Johns Hopkins University
• BA, Economics and International Relations
  Goucher College