About

Christa Acampora serves as the Buckner W. Clay Professor of Philosophy and Dean of the College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Virginia. Since her arrival in 2022, she has contributed to significant progress in Arts & Sciences, including implementing a new First Year curriculum, transforming undergraduate pre-major advising, increasing graduate student support, expanding resources for faculty research, and enhancing faculty and staff recruitment and retention. Her academic specialization includes modern European philosophy, moral psychology, and aesthetics. Her current research focuses on moral transformation, injury, and repair in various contexts, including the experiences of veterans, healthcare workers, and other populations. Prior to her role at UVA, she served as Deputy Provost and Professor of Philosophy at Emory University and has taught at the CUNY Graduate Center and Hunter College, where she also held the position of Associate Provost for Faculty Affairs and Research.

Research topics

• Social psychology
• Psychology
• Law
• Epistemology

Selected publications

• Where do moral injuries come from? A relational conception of moral practice and experience

  Journal of Military Veteran and Family Health · 2025-08-08

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The predominant account of the etiology of moral injuries among Veterans and military personnel in the clinical psychological and psychiatric literature construes morality as inherent in belief structures. This supports the conceptualization of moral injuries as intrapsychic phenomena resulting from exposure to high-stakes events in which fixed beliefs are contravened in ways that result in psychological harms, including maladaptive beliefs and distress. The authors identify several problems with this formulation and offer suggestions for modification, including greater focus on 1) experiences rather than events in identifying circumstances in which moral injuries occur and 2) degradation of relevant relationships rather than conflicts with and among moral contents. These shifts in framing could have epidemiological salience, facilitating more robust case characterization and enabling a variety of approaches to re-establishing the moral conditions that support life affirmation.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Critique of the standard model of moral injury

  New Ideas in Psychology · 2024 · 9 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Psychology
  • Epistemology
  • Social psychology

  This article seeks to describe in general terms what has become the standard way of conceptualizing moral injury in the clinical psychological and psychiatric literature, which is the key source for applications of the concept in other domains. What we call “the standard model” draws on certain assumptions about beliefs, mental states, and emotions as well as an implicit theory of causation about how various forms of harm arise from certain experiences or “events” that violate persons’ moral beliefs and systems. Our analysis makes these assumptions more explicit and subjects them to critical scrutiny. In so doing, we survey the current literature and identify basic features of how moral injuries are defined, how they are thought to occur, and the forms of treatment or repair that appear to be indicated. We caution that it matters how moral experience is characterized and argue that an alternative understanding of what is the moral in moral injury is important for overcoming critical challenges to the standard model. Moreover, recently evolving approaches to moral repair could be more consistent with an alternative model. Our concluding suggestion is that a more robust account of the nature of moral experience and its relations to self-identity and social experience more generally could advance understanding of the etiology of moral injury and promote rehabilitation.

  PublisherDOI

• Big Data and Artificial Intelligence

  2022-01-01 · 1 citations

  other1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 5. Contesting Wagner: How One Becomes What One Is

  2019-12-31

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 1. Agon as Analytic, Diagnostic, and Antidote

  2019-12-31

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 3. Contesting Socrates: Nietzsche’s (Artful) Naturalism

  2019-12-31

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Abbreviations and Citations of Nietzsche’s Works

  2019-12-31

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Nietzsche’s<i>On the Genealogy of Morality:</i>Moral Injury and Transformation

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2019-04-10 · 2 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  A summary is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.

  PublisherDOI

• 4. Contesting Paul: Toward an Ethos of Agonism

  2019-12-31

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Agonistic Communities: Love, War and Spheres of Activity

  Bloomsbury Academic eBooks · 2018-01-01 · 2 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Jessica Miller

  Vanderbilt University Medical Center

  102 shared

• Crista Lebens

  101 shared

• Amber Katherine

  Santa Monica College

  99 shared

• Therese Boos Dykeman

  Fairfield University

  98 shared

• Sarah Goering

  California State University, Long Beach

  51 shared

• Mary Warren

  San Francisco State University

  51 shared

• Mary A N N Warren

  Hunter College

  49 shared

• Thomas Stern

  University College London

  5 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Philosophy

  Emory University

  1997

• M.A., Philosophy

  Emory University

  1995

• B.A., Philosophy and History

  Hollins University

  1990