The prestigious International Francqui Professor Chair for Human Sciences 2016 has been granted to Professor Steven Vallas (College of Social Science and Humanities - Department of Sociology and Antropology) from Northeastern University (United States).
Steven Vallas will be a guest at the KU Leuven's Centre of Sociological Research of the Faculty of Social Sciences for 6 months in 2017 with Prof. dr. Valeria Pulignano as Promotor. During his stay in Belgium, Professor Steven Vallas will pursue work concerning Flexible Employment Regimes and Social Inequalities.

Steven P. Vallas received his PhD from Rutgers in 1983. He has taught at the Georgia Institute of Technology and at George Mason University (where he served as department chair). He is currently Professor of Sociology at Northeastern University in Boston. He is the author of numerous articles on  workplace technology, struggles over the organization of work, new forms of managerial authority, the knowledge economy, and the meaning of race in the contemporary workplace.  His articles have appeared in the American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, and Theory and Society, among many other places. He has written or edited several books, including Power in the Workplace (1993), The Nature of Work (edited, with Kai Erikson) and (most recently) Work: A Critique (Polity, 2012). He is currently writing about the commercialization of employee subjectivity and the meaning of workplace diversity.

Eight Belgian universities fully support Prof. Vallas’s International Francqui Professor Chair application. They consider this research project a unique learning and collaboration opportunity with Prof. Vallas himself as well as with the other participating Flemish and Walloon universities in Belgium:

• KU Leuven - Promotor institution: Prof. dr. Valeria Pulignano
• Universiteit Gent: Prof. dr. Lesley Hustinx
• Universiteit Hasselt: Prof. dr. Patrizia Zanoni
• Université Catholique de Louvain: Prof. dr. Laurent Taskin
• Vrije Universiteit Brussel: Prof. dr. Christophe Vanroelen
• Université de Liège: Prof. dr. François Pichault
• Universiteit Antwerpen: Prof. dr. Ive Marx
• Université Libre de Bruxelles: Prof. dr. Pierre Desmarez