About Me

I am Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for Mobilities Research and Policy at Drexel University in Philadelphia, where I also supervise doctoral students in Communication, Culture and Media. Before coming to Drexel I began my career at Lancaster University in the UK (1999-2006), and was Visiting Associate Professor at Swarthmore College (2006-2009).

My research began in Caribbean Studies, focusing on historical and comparative understandings of democratization, popular political participation, and connected global economies. I have broadened and deepened my research in this area over the past 20 years through my books Democracy After Slavery (University Press of Florida, 2000, CHOICE award 2002), Consuming the Caribbean (Routledge, 2003), Citizenship from Below (Duke University Press, 2012), and Aluminum Dreams (MIT Press, 2014), as well as dozens of articles in prominent historical and areas studies journals. My recent work addresses Caribbean climate change in relation to colonial histories and alternative visions for resilience and reconstruction after disasters, through a series of articles and my forthcoming book Island Futures: Caribbean Survival in the Anthropocene (Duke University Press, 2020).

Partly as a result of the work I began in Caribbean Studies, I turned to the development of a new field of mobilities when I was at Lancaster University, where I co-founded the Centre for Mobilities Research with John Urry, and the journal Mobilities with John and Kevin Hannam. My work in the field especially analyzes how power is exercised through mobility regimes and uneven infrastructures that (re)produce social inequalities. I helped to define this field through highly cited foundational articles such as “The New Mobilities Paradigm” (Sheller & Urry 2006), “Mobilities, Immobilities Moorings” (Hannam, Sheller & Urry 2006), and “The City and the Car” (Sheller and Urry 2000).

Beginning in the early 2000s I brought together scholarship in the field in a series of co-edited books, Tourism Mobilities (Sheller & Urry, 2004), Mobile Technologies of the City (Sheller & Urry 2006), Routledge Handbook of Mobilities (Adey, Bissell, Hannam, Merriman, Sheller 2014), and Mobility and Locative Media (De Souza e Silva & Sheller 2015). My most recent publications are the book Mobility Justice: The Politics of Movement in an Age of Extremes (Verso, 2018), the first major theoretical work on this concept, as well as a co-edited collection (with Sven Kesselring and Ole B. Jensen), Mobilities and Complexities (Routledge, 2018).

I was awarded the Doctor Honoris Causa from Roskilde University, Denmark (2015). I have received research funding from the National Science Foundation, the British Academy, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the MacArthur Foundation, the Mobile Lives Forum, and the Graham Foundation. I have held Visiting Fellowships at the University of Miami (2019); the Annenberg School of Communication at University of Pennsylvania (2016); the Penn Humanities Forum (2010); the Center for Mobility and Urban Studies at Aalborg University, Denmark (2009); Media@McGill, Canada (2009); the Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University (2008); and the University of Michigan (1997-1998).