Peter Beilharz

Peter Beilharz (born 13 November 1953) is an Australian sociologist. He is professor of critical theory at Sichuan University, Chengdu, PRC. Previously he was professor of sociology and remains Emeritus Professor at La Trobe University, Melbourne. He is adjunct professor at Curtin University, Perth, Western Australia. Beilharz is founding editor of the international journal of social theory Thesis Eleven published by Sage.

From 2002 to 2014, he was the 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.

Biography

Beilharz was born on 13 November 1953 in Melbourne, Australia. He attended Croydon High School and Rusden College. After a short experience of teaching at high school he went to Monash University, where he completed a doctorate on Trotskyism in 1984. He taught at Monash University, RMIT, and Melbourne University before replacing Ágnes Heller at La Trobe in 1988, where he progressed from lecturer through to personal chair in 1999.

In the course of his travels, he has visited Manila, Amsterdam, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Mexico City, São Paulo, 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. He is a Faculty Associate in the Sociology Department at Yale, and a visiting professor at the Bauman Institute, Leeds University.

Beilharz has written or edited thirty books, including Labour's Utopias (1992), Postmodern Socialism (1994), Transforming Labor (1994), Imagining the Antipodes (1997) and Zygmunt Bauman – Dialectic of Modernity (2002) and 200 papers. He has written on the social transformation of ideology within Americanism.

Accomplishments He was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia in 1997. From 1999–2000 he was the Harvard Chair of Australian Studies, Harvard University.