Rate My Professor Raewyn Connell

Raewyn Connell is Professor Emerita at the University of Sydney, affiliated with the Sydney School of Education and Social Work. She earned her BA with Honours from the University of Melbourne and her PhD from the University of Sydney. Connell's distinguished academic career spans several decades and institutions. She served as Lecturer in Government at the University of Sydney (1971-1972), Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Flinders University of South Australia (1973-1975), Foundation Professor of Sociology at Macquarie University (1976-1991), Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz (1992-1995), Professor of Education at the University of Sydney (1996-2004), and University Professor at the University of Sydney (2004-2014). She holds visiting appointments at institutions including Harvard University, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, University of Southern California, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, London University Institute of Education, and University of Chicago.

Connell's research specializations include large-scale class dynamics, gender hierarchies in schools, social theory of gender relations, poverty and education, sexuality and AIDS prevention, gender equity, masculinities, the politics of intellectual life, sociology of intellectuals, and Southern theory addressing Northern bias in social science and colonial structures of knowledge. Major publications encompass Ruling Class, Ruling Culture (1977), Class Structure in Australian History (1980), Making the Difference (1982), Teachers’ Work (1985), Gender and Power (1987), Schools and Social Justice (1993), Masculinities (1995, 2005), Gender in World Perspective (2002/2015), Southern Theory (2007), Confronting Equality (2011), and The Good University (2019). A Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia (FASSA), she served as President of the Sociological Association of Australia and New Zealand and the Australian Sociological Association, which named the Raewyn Connell Prize after her. Connell has advised United Nations initiatives on gender equality and peacemaking. Her work has been widely influential, cited approximately 98,000 times as of 2020 and translated into nineteen languages.