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. He has served on the editorial board of the Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales and as the Associate Editor for its English version since 2012. In 2014-15, he was named inaugural Neubauer Collegium Fellow at the University of Chicago. Appointed Directeur de publications of The Tocqueville Review/La Revue Tocqueville in 2014, he 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 Spring 2022 he was invited Kratter Visiting Professor to Stanford University’s History Department. The core of his project articulates a history and theory of democracy as a mode of popular magistrature, administration and public regulation. The project advances along two dimensions: first, a critical intellectual history featuring a close rereading of key texts and authors that may be read surprisingly differently when one places democracy – rather than liberalism or republicanism – at the center of our histories of political modernity. Second, the project turns on a rediscovery and re-prioritization of the variety of substantive and concrete activities, programs, and policies that have constituted democratic action. Among his many articles, he has published the two volumes on this project under the title Demos Assembled: Democracy and the International Origins of the Modern State, 1840-1880 (University of Chicago Press, 2018) and Demos Rising: Democracy and the Popular Construction of Public Authority in France, 1800-1850 (University of Chicago Press, 2025). The 2024-2025 academic year at the Center for European Studies, Harvard University will be focused on a third volume on democratic government in the French Revolution.