Mimi Sheller

Mimi Sheller, AB Harvard University (1988), MA (1993) and PhD (1997) New School for Social Research, is a professor of sociology and founding Director of the Center for Mobilities Research and Policy at Drexel University. She is the past President of the International Association for the History of Transport, Traffic and Mobility (2014-2017), co-editor of the journal Mobilities, which she co-founded in 2006, and associate editor of Transfers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies.

She is author of twelve books, including most recently Mobility Justice: The Politics of Movement in an Age of Extremes (Verso, 2018); Aluminum Dreams: The Making of Light Modernity (MIT Press, 2014) and Citizenship from Below (Duke University Press, 2012); and the co-edited volumes Mobilities and Complexities (2018); Mobilities Intersections (2018); The Routledge Handbook of Mobilities (2013) and Mobility and Locative Media (2014). As founding co-editor of the journal Mobilities, Associate Editor of Transfers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies, co-editor of "Mobile Technologies of the City" (2006) and "Tourism Mobilities" (2004), and author of several highly cited articles, she helped established the new interdisciplinary field of mobilities research.

She is currently completing the book Island Futures: Caribbean Survival in the Anthropocene, for Duke University Press, about post-disaster recovery and climate adaptation, with a focus on Haiti. With a production grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Research in the Fine Arts she is co-producing a documentary film on bauxite mining and aluminum, Fly Me to the Moon, with director Esther Figueroa.

In Fall 2016 she was Distinguished Visiting Scholar in the Center for Advanced Research on Global Communication at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School of Communication. She was awarded the Doctor Honoris Causa from Roskilde University, Denmark (2015) and has held Visiting Fellowships at the Centre for Mobilities Research, Lancaster University, UK (2005-2012); the Davis Center for Historical Studies, Princeton University (2008); Media@McGill, Canada (2009); the Center for Mobility and Urban Studies at Aalborg University, Denmark (2009); and the Penn Humanities Forum, University of Pennsylvania (2010).

She has been awarded research funding from the US National Science Foundation for two projects collaborating with engineers and hydrologists on post-earthquake humanitarian responses in Haiti (2010-2012) and adaptation to climate change in Haiti and the Dominican Republic (2012-2013). Based on this work she was invited to co-chair the NSF review of all Haiti RAPID grants, and served as an expert advisor to the World Bank’s Global Facility for Disaster Risk Reduction in its preparation of a report with the Government of Japan on the Japanese Great Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami.

She also was awarded grants from the MacArthur Foundation, the New School’s Janey Program, and the University of Michigan’s Center for African and African-American Studies to support her PhD dissertation and first book, Democracy After Slavery (Macmillan, 2000), winner of the Choice outstanding book award. In the UK she was awarded grants from the British Academy and the Arts and Humanities Research Council for her book Consuming the Caribbean (Routledge, 2003), a history of transatlantic circulation and consumption. Her recently complete research project, ImagineTrains, was supported by the Mobile Lives Forum (Paris), where she also serves on the International Scientific Board.