Demos Unbound: Administering a Democratic Revolution, 1770-1810.
Stephen W. Sawyer is the Ballantine-Leavitt Professor of History and director of the Center for Critical Democracy Studies at The American University of Paris (AUP). Sawyer came to AUP from the University of Chicago Center in Paris and the École Normale Supérieure where he was lecturer in the final years of his dissertation. After receiving fellowships from the EHESS, Fulbright, and Sciences Po, Sawyer served as part-time assistant to Pierre Rosanvallon at the Collège de France. He has served on the editorial board of the Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales and as associate editor for its English version since 2012. In 2014-15, he was named inaugural Neubauer Collegium Fellow at the University of Chicago. In 2014, he was appointed publications director of The Tocqueville Review and subsequently founded the online platform Tocqueville21 in 2017. In 2018-2019, he was named research fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.
In 2020, 2022, and 2023 Sawyer participated in three European Horizon grants, serving as a principal investigator on projects focusing on challenges to contemporary democracy. The core of his multi-volume project articulates a history and theory of democracy as a mode of popular magistrature, administration and public regulation. Sawyer returned to Stanford as the Kratter Visiting Professor in European History in 2022.
At the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies (CES), Sawyer will explore how democracy shifted from an age-old Aristotelian definition – one of three forms of government – to a mode of social organization in the early 19th century and what the political consequences of this conception are for governance.
Sawyer earned his Ph.D. in history at the University of Chicago.
This information is accurate for the time period that the visiting scholar is affiliated with CES.
Demos Unbound: Administering a Democratic Revolution, 1770-1810.
Sawyer, Stephen and Albert Wu. The Making of a World Order: Global Historical Perspectives on the Paris Peace Conference and the Treaty of Versailles. Routledge, 2023.
Sawyer, Stephen and Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins. Michel Foucault, Neoliberalism and Beyond. Rowman and Littlefield, 2019.
Sawyer, Stephen. Demos Assembled: Democracy and the International Origins of the Modern State, 1840- 1880. University of Chicago Press, 2018.
