Jaan Valsinger
I was born in Tallinn, Estonia in 1951. Currently I consider myself a cultural psychologist with a consistently developmental axiomatic base that is brought to analyses of any psychological or social phenomena. I find contemporary psychology’s empiricism deeply uninteresting and concentrate upon theoretical innovation through transdisciplinary scholarship. After working for over three decades in USA at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Clark University, I accepted in 2013 the position of Niels Bohr Professor of Cultural Psychology at Aalborg University, Denmark. in combination with collaboration with University of Luxembourg and Sigmund Freud Privatuniversität Wien in Austria and in Berlin. My main contributions are monographs The guided mind (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press, 1998), Culture in minds and societies (New Delhi: Sage, 2007), Ornamented Lives (Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishers, 2018) and Sensuality in Human Living (Springer, 2020). Currently I am working on a major theoretical treatise New General Psychology (to appear in 2021 by Springer) that would synthesize William Stern’s personology with my theory of Cultural Psychology of Semiotic Dynamics that builds on the theoretical heritage of James Mark Baldwin, Karl Bühler and Lev Vygotsky. I am a member of the Estonian Academy of Sciences. Prior to being awarded this Prize by APA I have been awarded major research prizes in Europe– the Alexander von Humboldt Prize of 1995 in Germany, and the Hans-Kilian-Preis of 2017 in Europe for interdisciplinary synthesis.