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).
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