Saskia Sassen

Saskia Sassen is the Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology at Columbia University and a Member of its Committee on Global Thought, which she chaired from 2009 till 2015. Her areas of interest and expertise centre around cities, immigration, and states in the world economy, with inequality, gendering and digitization three key variables running though her work.

Born in the Netherlands, she grew up in Argentina and Italy, studied in France, was raised in five languages, and began her professional life in the United States. She studied the impacts of globalisation such as economic restructuring, and how the movements of labour and capital influence urban life. She also studied the influence of communication technology on governance. Sassen observed how nation states begin to lose power to control these developments, and she studied increasing general transnationalism, including transnational human migration. She identified and described the phenomenon of the global city in her ground-breaking 1991 (updated in 2001) book of the same name, making her a widely quoted author on globalisation.

Among her other well-known works are A Sociology of Globalization (2007), Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (2008), Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy (2014; new edition forthcoming), and Cities in a World Economy (1994; 2018). For UNESCO, she organized a five-year project on sustainable human settlement with a network of researchers and activists in over thirty countries; it is published as one of the volumes of the Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (2006; http://www.eolss.net). Her books are translated into over twenty languages. She has written for The Guardian, The New York Times, Le Monde, Financial Times, Republica, El Pais, www.OpenDemocracy.net and several other newspapers and journals.

She has received many awards and honours, among them twelve doctor honoris causa, multiple named lectures, the 2013 Principe de Asturias Prize in the Social Sciences, election as a Foreign Member of the Royal Academy of the Sciences of the Netherlands, and made a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres by the French government.