Sander Van Der Leeuw

Sander Ernst van der Leeuw is an archaeologist, historian, academic, and author. He is an Emeritus Foundation Professor of Anthropology and Sustainability, Director Emeritus of the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability, and the Founding Director of School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University. van der Leeuw is the author, co-author and (co-) editor of twenty books including, Social Sustainability, Past and Future: Undoing Unintended Consequences for the Earth’s Survival, and The Model-Based Archaeology of Socio-Natural Systems and Complexity Perspectives on Innovation and Social Change. His research spans the fields of archaeology, sustainability, urbanization, and has particularly focused on complex system theory, innovation, intervention and ancient and modern interactions between humans and the environment. van der Leeuw is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a Corresponding Member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the Beijer Institute of Environmental Economics at Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Global Climate Forum, and the European Center for Living Technology. He is also an Honorary Fellow of the Research Institute for Humanity and Nature, a Visiting Fellow of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics, and an External Faculty Fellow of the Santa Fe Institute. Following his secondary education in Amsterdam, he enrolled in a Fulbright Exchange Studentship program at the University of Arizona in Tucson and took courses in Archaeology, Cultural Anthropology and History. Having moved back to Europe after a year, he pursued the degree equivalent of a BA in 1968 and an MA in 1972, and obtained an ABD (all but dissertation), in a double degree program in Medieval history and Prehistory in 1972 at the University of Amsterdam. Following that, he completed his Ph.D. in Prehistory (1976) at the same institution, became a Fulbright Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and conducted research work in Anthropology as well as Archaeology.