Wendell Bell

Wendell Bell is Professor Emeritus of Sociology and a Fellow of the Koerner Center, Yale University. He joined the Yale faculty in 1963, served as Chair of the Department of Sociology, helped to found the Yale Program (now Department) of African American Studies, directed the Yale Comparative Sociology Training Program, which required students to do research abroad, and was a Senior Research Scientist in the Yale Center for Comparative Research (2000-05). Before that, he was on the faculties of Stanford University where he directed the Stanford Survey Research Facility (1952-54), Northwestern University (1954-57), and UCLA, where he headed the West Indies Study Program (1957-63). He was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, CA (1963-64). During World War II, he was a naval aviator and did a tour of duty in the Philippines. His fields of interest are futures studies and social change, human values and global ethics, social stratification, ethnicity and nationalism (Caribbean, Western Europe, and comparatively worldwide). His early research was on the social areas of American cities, focusing on social class, race, and family life. Later, he studied elites, nationalism, and social change in the new states of the Caribbean and served as President of the Caribbean Studies Association in 1979-80. He has been a futurist for four decades and was a gubernatorial appointee to the Commission on Connecticut’s Future. He continues to work as a futurist-sociologist consultant, for example in 1999 participating in the work of the U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century. He is the author or co-author of ten books and more than 200 articles, chapters, and book reviews. In 2005 the World Futures Studies Federation awarded him a Lifetime Achievement Award in recognition of his many contributions to the field of futures studies and in 2008 the Association of Professional Futurists selected his two-volume Foundations of Futures Studies (1997) as being among the ten most important futures books of all time.