William H. Sewell, Jr.

William H. Sewell, Jr. (born 1940 in Stillwater, Oklahoma) is an American academic. He is the Frank P. Hixon Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of History and Political Science at the University of Chicago.

Family

Sewell is the son of William H. Sewell, a sociologist and the chancellor of the University of Wisconsin–Madison from 1967 to 1968.

Career

Sewell received his B.A. in history from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1962 and his Ph.D in history from the University of California, Berkeley in 1971. His dissertation was titled "The Structure of the Working Class of Marseille in the Middle of the Nineteenth Century," and his advisor was the historian Hans Rosenberg. He has made contributions in the areas of modern French labor, social, cultural and political history and social theory.

Selected 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

• "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 (Göttingen, 1974), 49-68.
• "Ideologies and Social Revolutions: Reflections on the French Case", Journal of Modern History 57 (March 1985): 57-85.
• "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 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.