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Wendell Bell

Wendell Bell

Contact Information

Department of Sociology
Yale University
Delivery Address (for packages) : 140 Prospect Street New Haven CT 06511-8933 USA
Postal Address (all other mail) : P.O. Box 208265 New Haven CT 06520-8265 USA
Facsimile : +1-203-432-6976
Email :

Professor Emeritus of Sociology
Senior Research Scientist, Center for Comparative Research

Wendell Bell (Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles, 1952) is Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Senior Research Scientist, Center for Comparative Research, Yale University. He came to Yale in 1963, served as Chair of the Department of Sociology, helped to found the Yale Department of African American Studies, and directed the Yale Comparative Sociology Training Program. 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 University of California, Los Angeles 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. He received his Ph.D. degree in sociology from UCLA in 1952 and did research 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 on 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 nine books and more than 200 articles. His most recent major work, which was selected as one of the best books on the future from 1996-2000 by Future Survey, is the two-volume Foundations of Futures Studies (Transaction Publishers, 1997).

Selected Publications

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Articles