Professor KIM, Sung Do,
Korea University-Department of Linguistics
Professor Kim is a full professor in the Faculty of Humanities at Korea University and has taught linguistics, semiotics, media theory and cultural sciences, and visual studies since 1995.
His CV attests to his qualifications. As the Founder of the Research Center for Applied Cultural Sciences and that of the Interdisciplinary Program for Visual Culture at Korea University in 2000, he organized over 30 international and domestic conferences in the semiotics and culture studies, which received coverages in major press media in Korea. He is currently Vice-President of IASS (International Association for Semiotic Studies) since 2014 (reelected in 2019 in the international conference of Buenos Aires) and he was the President of the Korean Association for Visual Culture (2015-2018) and that of the Korean Association for Semiotic studies (2013-2014) he was invited by many universities as a visiting scholar and a distinguished professor, such as Oxford University (LG Yeunam Foundation fellow, 2001-2002), Harvard University (Fulbright senior fellow, 2008-2009), Cambridge University (2012-2013), the Burgundy University in Dijon, L'École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, etc.
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He completed a research stay as an invited professor at the prestigious research center of the France, CNRS(Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) in 2020. His interdisciplinary research unities two strands of recent, significant semiotic inquiry: the development of European semiotics as an important paradigm of contemporary human sciences, and the transmission, reception, and circulation of semiotic and cultural theories in many sectors such as media theory and history, visual culture studies. He has published more than one Hundred articles in international and domestic journals such as Semiotica, Hermes, Langages, Degres, Signata, etc. He received the price of the Mouton d'Or in 1994, attributed by the Semiotica to the best article. His teaching, like his research, reflects a passionate interest in many cultural phenomena. His primary goal as a humanities educator- fueled by 28 years of experience teaching in the Korean higher education - is to harness the powerful relationships that students already have with cultural meaning and value in general, bridging the gap between those relationships and the sciences of meaning they encounter in academic settings. In exploring diverse sign systems in traditional and modern culture for a course on media history and media semiotics, he had students compare the experience of attempting to analyze the hidden semiotic codes of some specific cultural aspects. He also had students collaborate to create a concrete report in the new course, Humanities and Cultural and Creative Industries, in the style of business proposal. Through such activities, he transform media theory, cultural theory and sign making from an abstract phenomenon into a tangible part of student's lives, generating entry points for discussions of how semioticians and humanistic scholars have grappled with meaning and value creation. His research and his recent teaching experience - which has included designing and executing a yearlong course for other graduate students on teaching methods and advising faculty members on their syllabi - have primed him to create and teach inspiring cross new media theories, cultural theories and practices. He was selected to lead an interdisciplinary program of the Humanities and Cultural and Creative Industries for undergraduate students at Korea University in 2017. He is also prepared to conduct researches on a wide array of subjects in comparative media history, writing systems, cultural theory, environmental humanities, semiotics and history of linguistic ideas in the comparative and global perspective of the Eastern and Western Civilization.
