Peter Beilharz

Peter Beilharz (born 13 November 1953 in Melbourne, Australia) is an Australian sociologist. Professor of Sociology at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Beilharz is also a co-founder and editor of the international journal of social theory Thesis Eleven: critical theory and historical sociology published by Sage.[1] Since 2002 he has been director of the Thesis Eleven Centre for Cultural Sociology at La Trobe University. He is best known for his work in social theory and socialism, for his intellectual biography of the Australian art historian, Bernard Smith, and his several books on the eminent Polish sociologist, Zygmunt Bauman. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.[2] In 1999-2000 he was the Harvard Chair of Australian Studies, Harvard University.[3]

Biography

Peter Beilharz attended Croydon High School and Rusden College, and after a short experience teaching high school went to Monash University, where he completed a doctorate on Trotskyism in 1984.[4] He taught at Monash University, RMIT, and Melbourne University before replacing Agnes Heller at La Trobe in 1988, where he progressed from lecturer through to personal chair in 1999. In the course of his travels Beilharz has been a visitor at Manila, Amsterdam, Chapel Hill, Mexico City, Sao Paolo and Tokyo and a visiting fellow at Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University. He was the William Dean Howells Fellow at Harvard Library in 2002.[5] He is a Faculty Associate in the Sociology Department at Yale. Beilharz has written or edited twenty books, including Labour’s Utopias (1992), Postmodern Socialism (1994), Transforming Labor (1994), Imagining the Antipodes (1997) and Zygmunt Bauman – Dialectic of Modernity (2002) and eighty papers.[6]

Bibliography

References