About the Department

Cheryl Welch is Senior Lecturer and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Government.  Her teaching and research interests are in the areas of the history of political thought (especially nineteenth-century France), liberal and democratic theory, and the history of human rights. She is the author of Liberty and Utility: The French Idéologues and the Transformation of Liberalism (1984) and  De Tocqueville (2001), and the editor of Critical Issues in Social Theory (with M. Milgate, 1989) and The Cambridge Companion to Tocqueville (2006). Welch has also published numerous articles on liberalism, on utilitarianism, and on the works of Alexis de Tocqueville, and is co-editor of The Tocqueville Review/la Review Tocqueville. She is currently working on two projects: a book on the origins of human rights discourse in the nineteenth century and a study of the fate of utilitarianism in nineteenth and twentieth-century francophone thought.