Saskia Sassen
Professor of Sociology, Columbia University
September 20, 2007: “The Global City: Where Rich and Poor Meet”
Saskia Sassen recently moved to Columbia University to join the newly established Committee on Global Thought and the Department of Sociology, after a decade at the University of Chicago. She is also a Centennial Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics. Her new book is Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton University Press 2006). She has just completed for UNESCO a five-year project on sustainable human settlement for which she set up a network of researchers and activists in over 30 countries; it is published as one of the volumes of the Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (Oxford, UK: EOLSS Publishers) [www.eolss.net]. Other recent books are the 3rd. fully updated Cities in a World Economy (Sage 2006), A Sociology of Globalization (Norton 2007), and the co-edited Digital Formations: New Architectures for Global Order (Princeton University Press 2005). The Global City came out in a new fully updated edition in 2001. Her books are translated into sixteen languages. She serves on several editorial boards and is an advisor to several international bodies. She is a Member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a member of the National Academy of Sciences Panel on Cities, and was Chair of the Information Technology and International Cooperation Committee of the Social Science Research Council (USA). She has written for The Guardian, The New York Times, Le Monde Diplomatique, the International Herald Tribune, Newsweek International, Vanguardia, Clarin, the Financial Times, among others.