William H. Sewell Jr.

William H. Sewell Jr. is an American historian and social theorist, born in 1940 in Stillwater, Oklahoma, the son of sociologist William H. Sewell, who served as chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the Frank P. Hixon Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of History and Political Science at the University of Chicago, where he has taught since 1990 after earlier positions at the University of Arizona and the University of Michigan. His 1992 article A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation, published in the American Journal of Sociology, is a widely cited contribution to social theory that reworked the relationship between social structure and human agency, arguing that structures are both the medium and the outcome of the practices that reproduce or transform them. His other work, including Work and Revolution in France (1980) and Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (2005), combines French labor and revolutionary history with social and cultural theory.