Stephen Mennell
Professor Emeritus of Sociology at University College Dublin, born 1944
Stephen John Mennell (born 1944 in Yorkshire, England) is professor emeritus of Sociology at University College Dublin.
Mennell was educated at Huddersfield New College in West Yorkshire, and gained his BA in economics in 1966 from St Catharine's College, Cambridge (MA 1970) and his Doctorate at the University of Amsterdam. He was a Frank Knox Memorial Fellow (1966–67) at Harvard University. After returning from America, he taught at the University of Exeter, England, from 1967 to 1990, when he became Professor of Sociology in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at Monash University in Australia, before returning to Europe as Professor at University College Dublin in 1993. At UCD, along with his wife Barbara, he founded UCD Press on behalf of the university, and he also served as first Director (1999–2002) of what is now the Geary Institute, a new social scientific research institute established with Irish government support.
Stephen Mennell's major intellectual influence is Norbert Elias, and from 1997 to 2016 he was a member of the Board of the Norbert Elias Foundation, Amsterdam - in effect one of Elias's executors. He was General Editor of the Collected Works of Norbert Elias in English, which were published in 18 volumes (2006-2014) by UCD Press.
Elias's influence is especially evident in Mennell's landmark book All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present (1985), and in The American Civilizing Process (2007). His other books include Sociological Theory: Uses and Unities (1974; rev. edn 1980), Alexis de Tocqueville on Democracy, Revolution and Society (edited with John Stone, 1980), and two selections of Elias's writings edited with Johan Goudsblom.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1608981. VIAF identifies the subject as 61566092. The Library of Congress control number is n79099048. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1944, 1966, 1970 and 1967.
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This entry incorporates text from “Stephen Mennell” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.