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. His first teaching position was in the history department at the University of Chicago from 1969 to 1975. He was a long-term member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, from 1975 to 1980. He taught in the history department at the University of Arizona from 1980 to 1985 and in the history and sociology departments at the University of Michigan from 1985 to 1990, when he returned to the University of Chicago. He has made contributions in the areas of modern French labor, social, cultural and political history and social and cultural theory.
Selected publications
Books
Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848.
Structure and Mobility: The Men and Women of Marseille, 1820-1870.
A Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution: The Abbé Sieyes and "What Is the Third Estate?".
Silence and Voice in Contentious Politics .
Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation''..
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 Rosenberg zum 70 Geburtstag, 49-68.
"Ideologies and Social Revolutions: Reflections on the French Case", Journal of Modern History 57 : 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, 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, 91-125.
