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 who served as 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, the history of capitalism, and social and cultural theory.