William H. Sewell

Professor William H. Sewell Jr. is the Frank P. Hixon Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Political Science and History at the University of Chicago and a Trustee of the Institute for Advanced Study. Sewell has made significant contributions in the areas of modern French labor, social, cultural, and political history and social theory. He has long been interested in the intersection between history and social theory. Currently, he is working on the social and cultural history of capitalism in 18th-century France, but he also studies the history of contemporary capitalism. Sewell is the recipient of the 1981 Herbert Baxter Adams Prize from the American Historical Association for his book "Work and Revolution in France" (Cambridge University Press, 1980) and the 2008 Theory Prize for Outstanding Book from the Theory Section of the American Sociological Association for "Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation" (University of Chicago Press, 2005). He has also received the William Koren Jr. Prize (1982) of the French Historical Studies Association, and he was a Senior Fellow at the National Humanities Center in 2006-2007. He was a member of the Successful Societies Program at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research from 2003 to 2012. In 2011-2012 he served as President of the Social Science History Association.