Four Yale faculty teaching at Yale-NUS College this semester

With the start of the new academic semester, Yale-NUS College warmly welcomes four visiting faculty from Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, to sunny Singapore. In this article, we share a little more about the first group of faculty to arrive since the COVID-19 pandemic – Visiting Professors Marvin Chun and Woo-Kyoung Ahn, Visiting Associate Professor Jonathan Wyrtzen, Visiting Lecturer Leslie Gross-Wyrtzen – and the courses they will be teaching at Yale-NUS this semester. Prof Chun and Prof Ahn will also be supervising Yale-NUS capstone projects, and some of the faculty will be giving talks at the upcoming Cendana Rector’s tea series.

An accomplished academic, Prof Marvin Chun has had long-standing ties with Yale-NUS. He previously served as a member on the Governing Board of Yale-NUS College and hosted the inaugural class of Yale-NUS students at Yale as part of a summer immersion programme in 2013. Prof Chun was also Dean of Yale College and recently stepped down to return to full-time teaching and research. He is currently the Richard M. Colgate Professor of Psychology and Professor of Neuroscience at Yale, and his research interest is in the field of Cognitive Neuroscience of Cognition, Attention, Memory, and Perception. As he has published widely and been awarded multiple research grants in this field, students will benefit from Prof Chun’s extensive expertise and experience, as he teaches the course Performance Psychology and Neuroscience this semester. This course will delve into how variations in human cognitive and motor performance can be explained by neural mechanisms of attention and executive control, physiological factors such as sleep and exercise, and psychological factors like stress and positive thinking.

Another distinguished academic in the field of Psychology,  Prof Woo-Kyoung Ahn, will also be visiting Yale-NUS this semester. Prof Ahn is the John Hay Whitney Professor of Psychology at Yale, and earned her PhD in Psychology, with a minor in Artificial Intelligence, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her primary area of research is higher-level reasoning processes. In particular, she studies how people learn and represent concepts and causal relations, and how causal explanations shape our thinking processes. During her semester at Yale-NUS, she will be teaching the course, Topics in Psychology: Thinking. The course will share more about psychological studies on thinking and reasoning, and discuss ways to improve thinking skills. It will include relevant topics such as judgments and decision making, biases in thinking, counterfactual reasoning, causal inferences, and problem solving.

Teaching on campus as well will be Assoc Prof Jonathan Wyrtzen, an Associate Professor of Sociology, History, and International Affairs at Yale. His research interests include Comparative and Historical Sociology and Global, Regional and Transnational Sociology. His work is focused on the North African and Middle Eastern region, and his research engages a set of related thematic areas that include empire and colonialism, state formation and non-state forms of political organisation, ethnicity and nationalism, and religion and socio-political action. At Yale-NUS, Assoc Prof Wyrtzen will be teaching two courses: Empire, Nation, and Decolonization and Social Movements in Muslim Majority Societies. The former will be focused around how the “nation” works as a contested notion, and a contested boundary, within the broader frame of empire, while the latter will introduce students to social movement theory as an analytical and methodological framework for analysing the emergence and evolution of social movements and contentious politics across the Muslim world from the early 20th century to the present.

Another welcome addition to the Yale-NUS community this semester is Dr Leslie Gross-Wyrtzen, Lecturer with the Council on African Studies and Council on Middle East Studies at Yale. Dr Gross-Wyrtzen received her PhD from Clark University, and is a feminist geographer whose work focuses on the relationship between borders, race, and political economy between Africa and Europe. At Yale-NUS, Dr Gross-Wyrtzen will be teaching two courses: What is the Global South: Africa in the World and Race, Space, Power: Mapping the Global Colour Line. The former will look at how knowledge production on Africa shaped categories of gender, race, ethnicity, and religion, how these categories were central to the colonial project, and trace “colonial afterlives” that persist through development projects, humanitarian discourses, and the circulation of global capital. The latter will be an interdisciplinary, comparative exploration of how race makes space and how space makes race in the United States’ (US) and global contexts.

This amazing line-up of courses as we open the semester is a testament to the strong ties between Yale and Yale-NUS, enabling our students to benefit richly from the wealth of knowledge and experience of our visiting faculty. It is our hope that our visitors will find a home in Yale-NUS and create cherished memories during their time here.