Mimi Sheller, Internationally Recognized Scholar and Educational Leader, Named Inaugural Dean of The Global School at Worcester Polytechnic Institute

After earning an AB in history and literature from Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges and an MA in sociology and historical studies and a PhD in sociology from the New School for Social Research, Sheller spent a year as Du Bois-Mandela-Rodney Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for African and Afroamerican Studies at the University of Michigan. She held a number of academic positions, including senior lecturer in sociology and founding co-director of the Centre for Mobilities Research at Lancaster University in the UK, visiting associate professor of sociology at Swarthmore College, and president of the International Association for the History of Transport, Traffic, and Mobility, before joining Drexel University as a professor of sociology in 2009. She was named head of the Sociology Department in 2020.

At Drexel, Sheller founded and directed the Center for Mobilities Research and Policy, which focuses on a field of scholarship that she co-founded. Mobilities research, she said, “is an interdisciplinary field that studies the movement of people, objects, and information, as well as the complex new mobilities (and immobilities) that are afforded by changing technologies and infrastructures. In particular, we look at the power relations in all kinds of mobility systems. In my work, I focus on mobility justice, which explores the inequities in who has access to movement and who doesn’t, and also who has the right to dwell or to stay in place. The complexity of the world today demands a new interdisciplinary social science informed by humanities, arts, engineering, planning, and design.”

With funding from the National Science Foundation and international funders, including the National Research Foundation of Korea, the Innovation Fund Denmark, and the British Academy, she has conducted research around the world, including in the Caribbean, where she has promoted racial equality and social justice through her own work and supported Caribbean and African Diaspora scholarship, professional organizations, students, and research. Her recent book, Island Futures: Caribbean Survival in the Anthropocene (Duke University Press, 2020) explores the unintended consequences of humanitarian and research travel in post-earthquake Haiti and offers ethical principles for research or “voluntourism” in crisis situations in foreign countries.

Her work has won her numerous honors, including serving as the Henry King Stanford Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Miami’s Institute for the Humanities and as the inaugural Distinguished Visiting Scholar in the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. She has received Drexel’s Provost Award for Outstanding Career Scholarly Achievement, an honorary doctorate from Roskilde University in Denmark, and the David G. Nicholls Memorial Prize from the Society of Caribbean Studies, among other awards.

She is the author of seven monograph books, eight co-edited books, and 125 refereed journal articles and book chapters. The founding co-editor of the journal Mobilities since 2005 and associate editor of Transfers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies, she also serves on a number of journal editorial boards and international research advisory boards. She has consulted for international agencies, including the World Bank, and for such companies as Michelin, and has given dozens of keynote talks and invited lectures at leading universities in the United States and Canada, Latin America and the Caribbean, Asia, Australia, and Europe. She has extensive experience in fundraising, international publishing, global marketing, intercultural communications, and building relationships with universities, government agencies, research funders, and international non-governmental organizations.

Noting that her tenure at The Global School begins just as the world is emerging from a worldwide public health crisis, Sheller said the COVID-19 pandemic, which brought global travel nearly to a standstill, actually reinforces the need for the new venture. “The pandemic has demonstrated the fragility of our ties to the rest of the world—everything that connects us,” she said. “Our linkages with other places keep our way of life afloat, and the pandemic broke them.

“We need to rebuild those ties if we are to truly emerge from this pandemic—economically, in terms of public health, and in terms of the energy transition we all need to work on together. We need to recommit ourselves to global partnerships and to a global vision for the world. If anything, the pandemic should give us even more grit and determination to build The Global School.”