Saskia Sassen

Saskia Sassen is Robert S. Lynd professor of sociology and cochairs the Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University. She also serves on several editorial boards and is an advisor to several international bodies. Her research and writing focuses on globalization (including social, economic and political dimensions), immigration, global cities (including cities and terrorism), the new networked technologies, and changes within the liberal state that result from current transnational conditions. In her research she has focused on the unexpected and the counterintuitive as a way to cut through established "truths." Her three major books--The Mobility of Labor and Capital (1988), The Global City (1991; 2nd ed 2002), and Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (2006; 2nd ed. 2008)--have each sought to demolish key established "truths." In addition to these three works, Sassen recently published A Sociology of Globalization (Norton 2007). She has also just completed a five-year project for UNESCO on sustainable human settlement, for which she set up a network of researchers and activists in over thirty countries. The results of this study are published as one of the volumes of the Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems. She has also edited Deciphering the Global: Its Spaces, Scales, and Subjects (2006) and coedited Digital Formations: New Architectures for Global Order (2005). Her books have been translated into sixteen languages.