Education and Academic Career
Wallerstein first became interested in world affairs as a teenager in New York City, and was particularly interested in the Indian independence movement at the time. He attended Columbia University, where he received a B.A. in 1951, an M.A. in 1954 and a PhD degree in 1959. Immanuel Wallerstein also studied at other universities around the world, including Université libre de Bruxelles, Universite Paris 7-Denis-Diderot, and Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. He married Beatrice Friedman on May 25, 1964, and they had a daughter. He continued teaching at Columbia University until 1971, when he became professor of sociology at McGill University. In 1973 he was president of the African Studies Association. As of 1976, he served as distinguished professor of sociology at Binghamton University until his retirement in 1999. Wallerstein was head of the Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems and Civilization at Binghamton University until 2005.
Wallerstein has held visiting professor posts in the Chinese University of Hong Kong, British Columbia, and Amsterdam., was awarded multiple honorary titles, intermittently served as Directeur d'études associé at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, and was president of the International Sociological Association between 1994 and 1998.
During the 1990s he chaired the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences. The object of the commission was to indicate a direction for social scientific inquiry for the next 50 years.
Since 2000, he has been Senior Research Scholar at Yale University. He is also a member of the Advisory Editors Council of the Social Evolution & History journal. In 2003 he received the Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award from the American Sociological Association. In 2004 he was awarded with the Gold Kondratieff Medal by the International N. D. Kondratieff Foundation and the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences (RAEN).
Read more about this topic: Immanuel Wallerstein
Famous quotes containing the words education, academic and/or career:
“Our children will not survive our habits of thinking, our failures of the spirit, our wreck of the universe into which we bring new life as blithely as we do. Mostly, our children will resemble our own misery and spite and anger, because we give them no choice about it. In the name of motherhood and fatherhood and education and good manners, we threaten and suffocate and bind and ensnare and bribe and trick children into wholesale emulation of our ways.”
—June Jordan (b. 1939)
“Being in a family is like being in a play. Each birth order position is like a different part in a play, with distinct and separate characteristics for each part. Therefore, if one sibling has already filled a part, such as the good child, other siblings may feel they have to find other parts to play, such as rebellious child, academic child, athletic child, social child, and so on.”
—Jane Nelson (20th century)
“The 19-year-old Diana ... decided to make her career that of wife. Today that can be a very, very iffy line of work.... And what sometimes happens to the women who pursue it is the best argument imaginable for teaching girls that they should always be able to take care of themselves.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)