Dean Keith Simonton is Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Davis, he received his 1975 PhD in Social Psychology from Harvard University. His research program spans various questions associated with genius, creativity, leadership, talent, and aesthetics. Simonton’s curriculum vita lists more than 500 publications, including 13 books, namely: Genius, Creativity, and Leadership; Why Presidents Succeed; Scientific Genius; Psychology, Science, and History; Greatness; Genius and Creativity; Origins of Genius; Great Psychologists and Their Times; Creativity in Science; Genius 101; Great Flicks; Social Science of Cinema; and, most recently, The Wiley Handbook of Genius. Simonton received the William James Book Award, Sir Francis Galton Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Study of Creativity, the Rudolf Arnheim Award for Outstanding Achievement in Psychology and the Arts, the Henry A. Murray Award for “distinguished contributions to the study of individual lives and whole persons,” the Joseph B. Gittler Award for “the most scholarly contribution to the philosophical foundation of psychological knowledge,” the Distinguished Scientific Contributions to Media Psychology Award, the Theoretical Innovation Prize in Personality and Social Psychology, the George A. Miller Outstanding Article Award, the E. Paul Torrance and President’s Awards from the National Association for Gifted Children, and the Robert S. Daniel Award for Four-Year College/University Teaching. His next book project, tentatively titled The Psychology of Civilization: The Genius as the Creator of History, hopes to integrate the results from his lifelong research program, focusing on creative genius.
Dean Keith Simonton
Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Davis
Participant In These Roundtable Discussions
Thu
Jan 1st
2015
Jan 1st
2015
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Science and the Big Questions: Roundtable Series on the Physical and Spiritual World, the Brain-Mind Connection, and Human Development and Genetics
This series of fourteen roundtables will explore fundamental questions across the sciences and humanities, including knowledge and its limits, infinity, complexity and emergence, consciousness, memory, free will, genius, development, and the nature of human experience.
Sat
Oct 3rd
2015
Oct 3rd
2015
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Understanding Genius
This roundtable will examine competing philosophical and historical conceptions of genius, including the relationship between talent and originality, and whether originality is the defining feature of genius.