This special issue of Global Networks is devoted to the work of Ulf Hannerz, whose research in urban anthropology, media anthropology, and transnational cultural processes has established his international reputation.1 Over the years, this reputationhas earned him many distinctions – he is, for example, a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, former Chair of the European Association of Social Anthropologists, and anthropology editor for the new International Enyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Such honours, however, never led to complacence. There has been a steady stream of publications and a continuous series of research projects. Most recently, Hannerz not only completed a study of the work of news media foreign correspondents, which included field research that took him to four continents, he has already started a new research project about the cultural and political dimensions of cosmopolitanism. All this attests to some measure of curiosity and resolve.