Giovanni Arrighi

professor, sociology, Johns Hopkins University

Giovanni Arrighi, the George Armstrong Kelly Professor of Sociology and renowned authority in the fields of world systems analysis and historical sociology, has died after a year-long battle with cancer. Arrighi began his career teaching in Zimbabwe (1963-1966) and Tanzania (1967-1969), where he wrote landmark works on the political economy of Africa—works that set the terms of the scholarly debates in the field for decades. Giovanni, who was born in Milan in 1937 and received his doctorate in economics from the Universitá Bocconi in 1960, came to Johns Hopkins in 1998 to anchor the Sociology Department’s comparative-historical group. He served as director of the Institute for Global Studies in Culture, Power and History from 1999 to 2002 and as department chair from 2003 to 2006.