Left - Interviewing people displaced by the January 2010 earthquake in Leogane, Haiti, as part of a research project.
Right - Speaking about Haiti on WHYY Radio Times
Mimi Sheller is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for Mobilities Research and Policy at Drexel University. She is also Senior Research Fellow and former co-Director of the Centre for Mobilities Research at Lancaster University (UK) and founding co-editor of the journal Mobilities. Her work has a strong international dimension, including in the fields of Caribbean Studies and Mobilities Research.
She is the author of the books Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies (2003); Democracy After Slavery: Black Publics and Peasant Radicalism in Haiti and Jamaica (2000); and forthcoming Citizenship from Below: Erotic Agency and Caribbean Freedom (Duke University Press, 2012). She is co-editor of Uprootings/Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration (Berg, 2003), and with John Urry of Mobile Technologies of the City (Routledge, 2006), Tourism Mobilities (Routledge, 2004), and a special issue of Environment and Planning A on 'Materialities and Mobilities'. She has held recent Visiting Fellowships in the Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University (2008-09); Media@McGill in Montreal, Canada (2009); the Center for Mobility and Urban Studies at Aalborg University, Denmark (2009); and the Penn Humanities Forum at the University of Pennsylvania (2010-11). Sheller has served as Vice-Chair and Acting Chair of the Society for Caribbean Studies in the UK, and is on the organizing committee of the Caribbean Studies Association annual conference to be held in Guadeloupe in June 2012; and recently hosted a major international conference of the Pan-American Mobilities Network, held at Drexel in March 2011, with 76 participants from a dozen countries.
Her international research includes a recent NSF-funded study of post-earthquake Haiti, with colleagues in the College of Engineering. This led to her working with the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute as co-chair of a workshop developing recommendations for the NSF, and now she will be traveling to Tokyo in January 2012 as part of a team of 10 global experts commissioned by the World Bank's Global Facility for Disaster Risk Reduction to write a report on lessons from the Japanese earthquake and tsunami for developing countries.
Sheller is also currently collaborating on a project in Denmark on "Analyses of activity-based travel chains and sustainable mobility (ACTUM)" with colleagues at the University of Aalborg and the Technical University of Denmark. These collaborations have brought several Danish students to Drexel as Visiting Scholars and participants in our Mobilities in Motion conference in March 2011.
In September 2011 Sheller was invited to teach in the PhD Summer School of the Technical University of Berlin on the theme of Passengering. This brought together faculty and students from across Europe and North America, and included participating in the annual conference of the International Association for the History of Traffic, Transport, and Mobility (T2M). T2M have invited Sheller to co-organize their 2014 conference in the USA, in association with the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C.
