‘Fantastic 3’ World-Class Scholars Invited as Distinguished Chair Professor at SKKU
▲ (from the left) Prof. Jared Diamond, Prof. Michael Tomasello, Prof. Peter Albert David Singer
SKKU invites world-renowned scholars as distinguished chair professors to internationalize teaching domains and create joint research outcomes to expand the learning horizon globally.
In the past 2 years, 3 world-class scholars have been invited as distinguished chair professors. In 2021, Jared Diamond (UCLA) as a tenured professor, and this year, Michael Tomasello (Duke University) and Peter Albert David Singer (Princeton University) were appointed as distinguished chair professors at the university college.
Prof. Jared Diamond is a world-renowned cultural anthropologist and civilization researcher. He received his Ph.D. in Physiology from the University of Cambridge and is currently a professor of Geography at UCLA.
Starting out as a physiologist, he has expanded his field to evolutionary biology and biogeography, and is also active as a journalist contributing to scientific journals such as <Nature>, <Natural History>, and <Discover>. In 2005, he was selected as the 9th person among the ‘World’s Best Intellectuals’ jointly selected by <Prospect> of the U.K. and <Foreign Policy> of the U.S. His major books include the Pulitzer Prize-winning <Guns, Germs, and Steel>, <The Third Chimpanzee>, <Collapse>, <The World Until Yesterday>, and the recently published <Upheaval>, etc. He is a scholar familiar to domestic readers as he is about to appear on EBS’s ‘The Great Class Season 2’ this year.
In particular, <The Age of Upheaval>, an undergraduate course conducted with Prof. Jeong Woo Koo (Department of Sociology), has become one of the most popular subjects for undergraduates by dynamically dealing with the origins of modern economic and political systems, the rise and fall of the country and society based on Prof. Diamond’s civilized and environmentalist perspective.
Prof. Michael Tomasello is a world-renowned primatologist who is a professor at Duke University and co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany. He majored in psychology and has made great achievements in research comparing how the cognitive abilities and culture of primates are different from those of humans and in the study of language acquisition in children. He studied the origins of human social cognitive abilities, focusing on sociality and cooperation, and made significant contributions to the understanding of the cognitive processes of primates. His books include <A Natural History of Human Thinking>, <Why We Cooperate>, <Origins of Human Communications>, and <The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition>. This year, he conducted a Sungdae Myeongnyun lecture under the theme of ‘Cooperation and Human Morality’ with Prof. Daeun Park and Prof. Minue Kim of the Department of Psychology.
Prof. Peter Singer is a professor at Princeton University’s Center for Human Values College and Department of Bioethics, and a professor laureate at the University of Melbourne. He gained international fame after the publication of <Animal Liberation> (1975) and wrote <Practical Ethics> (1979), <The Life You Can Save> (2009), and <Ethics in the Real World> (2016). In 2005, Time magazine included him on its list of the 100 most influential people in the world, and in 2012 he was awarded the Companion of the Order of Australia, Australia’s highest civil service. In Korea, he is known as a philosopher familiar with the high school students because he was asked in the ‘Life and Ethics’ subject of the Korean SAT mock evaluation in June 2020. In 2021, he appeared in EBS’s ‘The Great Class Season 1’. On October 5, he will hold a Sungdae Myeongnyun lecture under the theme of ‘Life & Ethics’ with Prof. Jeong Woo Koo.
The 3 scholars appointed as SKKU distinguished chair professors will meet and communicate with students through regular special lectures during the semester, discuss issues in various fields such as politics, economy, humanities, and society from a global perspective, and share future prospects and response strategies.
The 1st international academic conference, held on January 14 with the theme of ‘An Age of Upheaval’, shared the view that ‘the issues that humanity should pay attention to are nuclear, climate change, resource depletion, and inequality rather than COVID-19’, and more than 10,000 people visited the website.
The 2nd SKKU International Conference, which will be held on Oct. 28, with the theme of ‘Why cooperation now?’. It will be attended by Prof. Diamond, Prof. Tomasello, and Prof. Singer to discuss why humans, communities and countries are heading for greater serious conflict, whether the possibility of cooperation is reversed and stopped, and how to restore a sense of cooperation and communication.
Prof. Joonmo Cho (Executive Vice President of Humanities and Social Sciences Campus) said, “We will invite world-class scholars to expand education and research with global impact, explore new values in the future society, and create a convergence cluster that encompasses humanities and social natural sciences. In particular, by expanding the education horizon for students globally through lectures by world-class scholars, and conducting practical global classes that combine contents with eminent professors from overseas universities, we will create a future university education model that meets the digital education revolution era. We plan to continuously invite world-class scholars.”
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