A professor emeritus in the Department of Sociology at Seoul National University, Chung Chinsung is a member of the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. After graduating from Seoul National University (BA and MA), she received a doctoral degree in sociology from the University of Chicago. She served as a professor in the Department of Sociology at Seoul National University and the president of the Korean Sociological Association, Korean Association of Women’s Studies, and Korean Association of Human Rights Studies, respectively. She was active in the UN Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights and the UN Human Rights Council Advisory Committee. She was a member of the South Korea-Japan Joint History Research Committee, Constitutional Court of Korea Advisory Committee, and Supreme Court of Korea Public Service Ethics Committee and the chair of the Seoul Metropolitan Gender Equality Committee and the Korean National Police Agency Gender Equality Committee, respectively. She also contributed to civil society activities as the co-representative of the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan and the director of the Korea Center for United Nations Human Rights Policy. She served as the director of the Institute for Social Development and Policy Research and the Human Rights Center, respectively, at Seoul National University.
She published numerous books and academic papers on women’s human rights and Korean-Japanese relations including A Theory of Social Movements in Contemporary Japan, Koreans in Japan, The United Nations and the Formation of Human Rights Norms, Human Rights in East Asia: A Comparison of Korean and Japanese Human Rights Improvement (co-authorship), The Current History of Korean Women (co-authorship), Sociology of Human Rights (co-authorship), and Gender Perspective on Modern and Contemporary History of Korea and Japan (co-authorship).
