Dean of the Global School Mimi Sheller is being awarded an honorary doctorate from Aalborg University in Denmark, with a ceremony and public lecture taking place on the 16th-17th of April 2026. This is her second honorary doctorate in recognition of her international contributions to co-creating the interdisciplinary field of mobility studies.
Sheller also has just been named by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs and World Learning as a candidate on the Fulbright Specialist Roster, a three-year recognition beginning in January 2026. She has been invited to undertake her first Fulbright-funded visit in the School of Arts, Sciences and Humanities at the University of Saõ Paulo, Brazil, in early Fall 2026 to work with the Mobilities and Tourism Research Group on a project related to international academic exchange, project-based learning, and international educational mobilities, including a conference addressing climate justice.
During a sabbatical year starting in the summer of 2026, Sheller will accept two visiting professorships in Europe. She will first take up the EAISI Visiting Professorship in late Fall 2026 at the Eindhoven Artificial Intelligence Systems Institute at Eindhoven University (EAISI) in the Netherlands. There, she will collaborate on research about responsible mobility and ethical AI. She will lecture on AI and mobility data justice, provide two master classes on mobility data justice in the age of AI and for the CORESpaces Horizon project in Industrial Engineering & Innovation Sciences. She will also co-author a journal article ‘Mobility Data Justice at the Intersection of Automated Mobilities and Artificial Intelligence’ with Professor Frauke Behrendt, with whom she wrote a chapter in the forthcoming book Automated Horizons: The Digital Revolution in Mobilities (De Gruyter 2026).
In early 2027, Sheller will serve as a visiting professor at Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, in Germany, where she will join the national Collaborative Research Center (CRC) on Human Differentiation, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation). There, she will work with professors Heike Drohtbohm and Gabriele Schabacher in the research group on mobility and segregation, including delivering lectures, holding PhD workshops, and giving the keynote address for an international workshop on infrastructures of im/mobilities.
