Mimi Sheller is a professor of sociology in the Department of Culture and Communication, and the founding Director of the New Mobilities Research and Policy Center at Drexel University in Philadelphia.
Education
She attended Harvard University where she earned a Bachelor of Arts in History and Literature, summa cum laude, in 1988. She received an Master of Arts in Sociology and Historical Studies in 1993 and a Doctor of Philosophy in 1998 at the New School for Social Research. She completed her dissertation under the supervision of Charles Tilly, William Roseberry, and Mustafa Emirbayer.
Career
She is widely-cited and considered a "key theorist in mobilities studies" and specializes in the post-colonial context of the Caribbean. From 1997-1998, Sheller was the Dubois-Mandela-Rodney Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for African and Afroamerican Studies at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. She is a founding director and visiting senior research fellow at the Center for Mobilities Research and Policy (CeMoRe) at Lancaster University in England.
In 2003, she earned a Postgraduate Certificate in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education from Lancaster University.
Along with British sociologist John Urry, she co-founded, and currently co-edits, the academic journal Mobilities. She is also the Associate Editor of Transfers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies.
Politics
Her first book, Democracy After Slavery: Black Publics and Peasant Radicalism in Haiti and Jamaica, received the Choice Magazine Outstanding Book Award in 2002.