IN THIS SECTION
Faculty
Visiting Faculty
Louis Granados
Qunyu Tan
Emeriti Faculty
Bentley Duncan
Charles Gray
Harry Harootunian
Ping-ti Ho
Halil Inalcik
Barry Karl
Julius Kirshner
William McNeil
Peter Novick
Associated Faculty
William H. Sewell, Jr.
Frank P. Hixon Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of History and Political Science
Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley 1971
The University of Chicago
Pick Hall 412
5828 S. University Ave.
Chicago, IL 60637
(773) 702-0900 -- Office
(773) 702-1689 -- Fax
Email: w-sewell@uchicago.edu
Field Specialties
Modern French Social and Cultural History; Labor History; Social Theory.
Biography
My work has two distinct foci: (1) the history of early modern and modern Europe and (2) the relationship between history and social theory. My empirical historical research concerns French social, labor, political, and cultural history, particularly in the revolutions of 1789, 1830, and 1848. I am currently working on the relationship between eighteenth-century capitalism and the cultural origins of the French Revolution. Over the past fifteen years, much of my writing and teaching has centered on the development of a theoretical vocabulary that simultaneously speaks to history and the other social sciences. Most of this work is now published in Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (University of Chicago Press, 2005)
My courses are generally cross-listed with Political Science; many of them focus on theoretical approaches or problems in interdisciplinary historical studies. Although the history of eighteenth and nineteenth century France often figures somewhere in these courses, they usually include cases drawn from various regions of the world and from different historical periods. I have also recently taught more conventionally historical courses on the old regime and the French revolution and on the emergence of capitalism in early modern Europe.
I will retire after Spring Quarter 2007.
Publications
Books
Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848 (Cambridge University Press, 1980).
Structure and Mobility: The Men and Women of Marseille, 1820-1870 (Cambridge University Press, 1985).
A Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution: The Abbé Sieyes and "What Is the Third Estate?" (Duke University Press, 1994).
Silence and Voice in Contentious Politics (joint author) (Cambridge University Press, 2001)
Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (University of Chicago Press, 2005)
Articles and Chapters (selected)
"Etat, Corps and Ordre: Some Notes on the Social Vocabulary of the French Old Regime," in H. U. Wehler, ed., Sozialgeschichte Heute: Festschrift für Hans Rosenburg zum 70 Geburtstag (Gottingen, 1974), 49-68.
"Social Change and the Rise of Working-Class Politics in Nineteenth Century Marseille," Past and Present, 65 (November, 1974): 75-109.
"Ideologies and Social Revolutions: Reflections on the French Case," Journal of Modern History 57 (March, 1985): 57- 85.
"Uneven Development, the Autonomy of Politics, and the Dockworkers of Nineteenth-Century Marseille," American Historical Review 93 (1988): 604-37
"Le Citoyen, La Citoyenne: Activity, Passivity and the French Revolutionary Concept of Citizenship," in Colin Lucas, ed., The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, vol. 2, Political Culture of the French Revolution (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1988), 105-25.
"A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency and Transformation," American Journal of Sociology 98 (1992): 1-29
"Toward a Post-Materialist Rhetoric for Labor History<," in Rethinking Labor History: Essays on Discourse and Class Analysis, ed. by Lenard R. Berlanstein (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 15-38.
"The Sans-Culotte Rhetoric of Subsistence," in Keith M. Baker and Colin Lucas, ed., The Terror in the French Revolution (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1994), 249-269.
"Three Temporalities: Toward an Eventful Sociology," in The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences, Terrence J. McDonald, ed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 245-80
"Political Events as Structural Transformations: Inventing Revolution at the Bastille," Theory and Society 25 (1996): 841-81
"The Concept(s) of Culture," in Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture, eds. Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999): 35-61.
"Space in Contentious Politics," in Ronald Aminzade, Doug McAdam, Elizabeth Perry, William H. Sewell, Jr., Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly, Silence and Voice in the Study of Contentious Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2001), 51-89.
"The French Revolution and the Emergence of the Nation Form," in Michael Morrison and Melinda Zook eds., Revolutionary Currents: Transatlantic Ideology and Nationbuilding, 1688-1821 (Rowman and Littlefield, 2004), 91-125.