School of Historical Studies History

Professor Charles Sowerwine

Honorary Staff
Telephone: (+61 3) 8344 8999
Email: c.sowerwine@unimelb.edu.au
Fax: (+61 3) 8344 7894
Location: Room 321 West
History, John Medley Building
The University of Melbourne VIC 3010
Academic Profile (click on the link for more information)
Biography
Research
Publications


Biography

Charles Sowerwine studied history at Oberlin College and completed post-graduate degrees at the University of Wisconsin. He taught at the University of Paris before coming to Melbourne in 1974. He has written extensively in social and women's history, concentrating on late nineteenth- and twentieth-century France. His Sisters or Citizens? Women and Socialism in France since 1870 (Cambridge, 1982), was first published in France and was the first work published by an American (as he then was) by the prestigious Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques. His article, “Workers and Women in France before 1914: The Debate over the Couriau Affair” (Journal of Modern History 55: 411-441 [1983]) was awarded the Koren Prize by the Society for French Historical Studies. With Claude Maignien, he wrote a biography of the pioneering socialist feminist, Dr Madeleine Pelletier (Paris, 1992), the first woman psychiatry intern in France. From 1996 through 2002, he held a joint appointment as Professor of Modern French History at the Université de Versailles-Saint Quentin en Yvelines. Of his recent work, he is most attached to The Wandering Scholar’s Guide to Melbourne in its new edition co-authored by Alice Garner (5th edn; Melbourne, 2007) and his history intended for the general reader, France since 1870: Culture, Politics, Society (Palgrave, 2007), of which a second edition is in preparation to appear next year.

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Research

He is working on a study of nationalist and Europeanist discourse in twentieth-century France and, with Susan Foley of Victoria University of Wellington, on a project tentatively called “Passion and Politics: Love and the Republic in the Letters of Léon Gambetta and Léonie Léon, 1872-1882.”

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Recent publications

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