Rogers Brubaker

Rogers Brubaker is Professor of Sociology and UCLA Foundation Chair at the University of California, Los Angeles.  Brubaker has written widely on social theory, immigration, citizenship, nationalism, and ethnicity. His first book explored the idea of rationality in the work of Max Weber, while his essays on Pierre Bourdieu helped introduce Bourdieu to an English-speaking audience. His next two books analyzed European nationalism in historical and comparative perspective. Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (1992) sought to explain the sharply differing ways in which citizenship has been defined vis-à-vis immigrants in France and Germany and helped establish what has since become a flourishing field of citizenship studies; Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (1996) compared contemporary East European nationalisms with those of the interwar period, both emerging after the breakup of multinational states into would-be nation-states.  Subsequently, in a series of analytical essays, many of them collected in Ethnicity without Groups (2004), Brubaker has critically engaged prevailing analytical stances in the study of ethnicity, race, and nationalism and sought to develop alternative analytical resources.  These informed his collaborative book Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town (2006), which examined the everyday workings of ethnicity in a setting of highly charged ethnonational conflict. Brubaker is currently working on integrating the study of religion more closely with the study of ethnicity and nationalism, exploring the ambivalent consequences of newly popular genetic modes of explaining human differences for both the everyday experience and the politics of ethnicity, race, and nationhood, and analyzing the relation between economic structures and processes and politicized ethnicity and nationalism.
Brubaker has taught at UCLA since 1991. Before coming to UCLA, he was a Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows of Harvard University (1988-1991). He has been awarded a MacArthur Fellowship (1994-99), a Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation (1994-99), and Fellowships from the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (1995-96) and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1999-2000). He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009. Brubaker is a Senior Editor of Theory and Society and a member of the Editorial Board of numerous journals. He serves as a Recurring Visiting Professor in the Nationalism Studies Program of the Central European University in Budapest.