Professor Ulf Hannerz is Professor Emeritus of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University, Sweden.
After graduation from Stockholm University, Professor Hannerz obtained an MA from Indiana University, and then returned to Stockholm University for doctoral work. He took up an offer as the project anthropologist for a sociolinguistic study of African-American dialect carried out by the Center for Applied Linguistics in Washington, DC. He spent two years doing research in a Washington inner-city neighborhood, resulting in his PhD dissertation which became the book Soulside: Inquiries into Ghetto Culture and Community in 1969. In 1974, he wrote the monograph Caymanian Politics: Structure and Style in a Changing Island Society after conducting field work in the Cayman Islands in the Caribbean.
Upon returning to Stockholm University to teach and develop social anthropological research, Professor Hannerz used his Washington study as a point of departure for more theoretical work in the newly expanding field of urban anthropology, leading to the book Exploring the City (1980). Inspired by experiences gained from his field stays in Kafanchan, central Nigeria in the 1970s, he authored the books Cultural Complexity (1992) and Transnational Connections (1996) on the social organization of contemporary world culture. Besides the concepts of "global ecumene" and cosmopolitanism, Professor Hannerz was also interested in the growing centrality of media in people´s lives. By the 1990s, he made media the focus of a new research project, a multi-sited study which took him to Jerusalem, Johannesburg and Tokyo, and more briefly, to serveral other cities, including Hong Kong. Apart from various shorter publications, this study resulted in the book Foreign News: Exploring the World of Foreign Correspondents (2004). Most recently, he has engaged in a critical study of the large-scale scenarios for the future of the world that appeared since the end of the Cold War and again since September 11, 2001.
Professor Hannerz has written and edited a number of books in Swedish apart from those mentioned above. He was for many years editor of the journal Ethnos, and more recently the section editor for anthropology in a very large-scale publication project, the 26-volume International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences in 2001. Altogether his books and articles have appeared in 14 languages.
During his scholarly career, he has been the visiting professor or research fellow at a number of universities, including University of Pittsburgh, University of California at Berkeley, City University of New York, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in the USA, University of Manchester, Oxford University, London School of Economics, University of Amsterdam, Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften in Vienna, University of Tel Aviv, University of Tokyo and University of Adelaide. He has also been the Director of the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences in Uppsala.
Professor Hannerz has received considerable international recognition. He is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and also an honorary fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. Most recently he was elected an honorary member of the European Association of Social Anthropologists, of which he was the President. In 2000, he gave the Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures at the University of Rochester, and in 2005 he received an honorary doctorate at the University of Oslo, Norway. |