---
id: people/wendell-bell
about:
  label: Wendell Bell
  depiction: people/wendell-bell.jpg
  depiction_credit: 'Unknown photographer, about 1948, Wikimedia Commons, public domain.'
  description: >-
    Yale sociologist (1924 to 2019) who helped found futures studies as a field
    and wrote its two-volume textbook, Foundations of Futures Studies.
  tags:
    - futures studies
    - sociology
person:
  affiliation: Yale University
  role: sociologist and futurist
provenance:
  origin: agent
  sources:
    - title: Wendell Bell - Wikipedia
      url: 'https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendell_Bell'
    - title: >-
        Wendell Bell, sociologist helped found field of futures studies (Yale
        News, 12 December 2019)
      url: >-
        https://news.yale.edu/2019/12/12/wendell-bell-sociologist-helped-found-field-futures-studies
  created: '2026-11-02'
  reviewed: '2026-11-02'
  reviewed_by: 'Claude, from the sources listed'
  status: draft
---
Wendell Bell was an American sociologist and futurist, born on 27 September 1924 and died on 3 November 2019.[^1,2] He was a naval aviator in the Philippines during the Second World War, graduated from Fresno State in 1948 and took his PhD at UCLA in 1952.[^1,2] He taught at Stanford, Northwestern and UCLA before joining Yale in 1963, where he chaired the sociology department and retired in 1995.[^1,2]

His early research was on social class, race and family life in American cities, and later on elites, nationalism and social change in the new states of the Caribbean.[^2] Yale credits him with a part in founding futures studies, where he set out possible, probable and preferable futures and studied the worldviews and myths that underlie each kind.[^2] He worked as a futurist for over forty years.[^1] The World Futures Studies Federation gave him a lifetime achievement award in 2005, and in 2008 the Association of Professional Futurists named his two-volume Foundations of Futures Studies one of the ten most important books in the field.[^1,2]

He is the author of [Foundations of Futures Studies](/media/foundations-of-futures-studies/).