Kurt Danziger
Kurt Danziger
is an academic whose innovative
contributions to the history of psychology have received widespread
international recognition. He
was Professor of Psychology at York
University from 1965 to 1994 and is now Professor Emeritus. In 1972 he was
elected a Fellow of the Canadian Psychological Association and in 1989 a Fellow
of the Royal Society of Canada. He received the CPA Education and Training Award
in 1994, having taken a leading role in establishing the History and Theory
Option of the Psychology Graduate Programme at York University and having
supervised many of the students who took this option during the first 15 years
of its existence.
Since the late 1970’s, Danziger’s teaching and research
have been largely devoted to the history and theory of psychology. His initial
concentration was on the history of psychological methodology. The results of
his work in this area were presented in his book, Constructing the Subject:
Historical Origins of Psychological Research, published by Cambridge
University Press in 1990. The review that appeared in Contemporary Psychology
in July 1992 judged that "without a doubt this is the most important book on the
history of psychology to come along in years....the understanding and the very
teaching of the history of our discipline will have been profoundly altered by
Danziger's analysis".
The historical interest in research practice was based
on many years' experience of empirical research in different areas of
Psychology. Danziger’s earliest research publications reported on his
experimental work with laboratory rats, but, under the influence of the work of
the ethologist, N. Tinbergen, he became sceptical of the value of much of this
work. There followed a period of research on conceptual development in the
Piagetian tradition as well as experimental work on time judgement. A lasting
engagement with social psychological topics was reflected in numerous research
papers, as well as the books Socialization (1971) and
Interpersonal
Communication (1976).
More recently, the history of psychological categories
has formed the main focus of Danziger’s studies. The first major product of this
work appeared as a Sage publication in 1997, titled Naming
the Mind: How Psychology Found its Language. A further book,
Marking the Mind: A History of Memory, was published in 2008. In 2003 a
group of authors from a number of countries contributed to a volume on
Danziger’s work: Rediscovering the History of Psychology: Essays Inspired by
the Work of Kurt Danziger (Springer). That volume also contains a
list of Danziger’s publications.
Kurt Danziger’s work has always been international in scope. His books have been translated into Danish, German, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, and Swedish. He has given numerous invited addresses in Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, the USA, as well as in Canada. He was a guest professor at the University of Konstanz, Germany, in 1988. He is or was on the editorial board of such journals as Theory & Psychology, History of the Human Sciences, Culture & Psychology, and Philosophy of the Social Sciences. Although the bulk of his research output has appeared in the psychological literature, he has also published studies in sociological, historical, and philosophical journals.
A wide range of experience in academic settings all over the globe provides the background for Kurt Danziger's deep appreciation of the importance of social and cultural context for psychological theory and research. He was born in Germany but his family emigrated to South Africa just before World War II. There he completed his schooling and took a degree with distinction in Chemistry. Then he switched to the study of Philosophy and Psychology. He obtained his doctorate in experimental psychology at the University of Oxford in 1952. His first teaching position was at the University of Melbourne, Australia. That was followed by eight years at two South African universities, a period which was interrupted by two years as a Visiting Professor in Indonesia. Before he settled in Canada he was Head of the Department of Psychology at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Upon his departure in 1965 he was declared a "prohibited person" by the then South African government, a ban that remained in force for a quarter century. However, with the transition to democracy, Danziger regularly spends one quarter of each year in South Africa. He holds an honorary professorship at the University of Cape Town and was awarded an honorary degree by that institution in 2004.