Rogers Brubaker

About

Rogers Brubaker is a Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he holds the UCLA Foundation Chair. His work has extensively covered social theory, immigration, citizenship, nationalism, ethnicity, race, gender, populism, and digital hyperconnectivity. Brubaker's early scholarship explored rationality in Max Weber's work and contributed to introducing Pierre Bourdieu to an English-speaking audience. His notable books include analyses of European nationalism, such as 'Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany' (1992) and 'Nationalism Reframed' (1996), which examined differing conceptions of citizenship and the emergence of nationalism in post-multinational states. His collection 'Ethnicity without Groups' (2004) critically engaged prevailing analytical stances on ethnicity, race, and nationalism, leading to further collaborative work on ethnonational conflict. More recent research has addressed contemporary issues of inequality, biology, sacredness, gender, and identity, with publications like 'Grounds for Difference' (2015), 'Trans: Gender and Race in an Age of Unsettled Identities' (2016), and upcoming works on gender identity. Brubaker's scholarship also encompasses the study of populism across Europe and trans-Atlantic contexts, and his recent book 'Hyperconnectivity and Its Discontents' (2022) examines digital hyperconnectivity as a 'total social fact' impacting various aspects of society. He has been a faculty member…

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Law
• Epistemology
• Philosophy
• Political economy
• Computer Science
• History
• Market economy
• Law and economics

Selected publications

• Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town

  Princeton University Press eBooks · 2018-06-05 · 503 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  Rogers Brubaker and his associates undertake an ambitious and challenging task in their monograph on Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town. Their “task” is to examine the everyday workings of ethnicity and nationhood within the context of elite-level ethno-political conflict in Cluj, Romania, but concentrating primarily on the perceptions and actions of the average inhabitants of the city and not its leaders. They undertake this task by first providing a historical…

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• Populism and nationalism

  Nations and Nationalism · 2019-04-29 · 377 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Few social science categories have been more heatedly contested in recent years than ‘populism’. One focus of debate concerns the relation between populism and nationalism. Criticising the tendency to conflate populism and nationalism, De Cleen and Stavrakakis argue for a sharp conceptual distinction between the two. They situate populist discourse on a vertical, and nationalist discourse on a horizontal axis. I argue that this strict conceptual separation cannot capture the productive…

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• Paradoxes of populism during the pandemic

  Thesis Eleven · 2020 · 119 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  Populist protests against Coronavirus-related restrictions in the US appear paradoxical in three respects. Populism is generally hostile to expertise, yet it has flourished at a moment when expertise has seemed more indispensable than ever. Populism thrives on crisis and indeed often depends on fabricating a sense of crisis, yet it has accused mainstream politicians and media of overblowing and even inventing the Corona crisis. Populism, finally, is ordinarily protectionist, yet it has turned an…

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• Digital hyperconnectivity and the self

  Theory and Society · 2020 · 101 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
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• Cross‐domain comparison and the politics of difference

  British Journal of Sociology · 2019-01-21 · 15 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This paper makes the case for cross-domain comparison as an undertheorized form of comparative analysis. The units of analysis in such comparisons are not (as in most comparative analysis) predefined units within a domain or system of formally similar yet substantively different categories or entities; they are the domains or systems of categorically organized differences themselves. Focusing on domains of categorical difference that are central to the contemporary politics of difference, we con…

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Frequent coauthors

• Jon Elster

  81 shared

• Stephen Holmes

  University of Central Florida

  81 shared

• Richard Biernacki

  81 shared

• Peter Stamatov

  9 shared

• Mara Loveman

  Skidmore College

  9 shared

• Stephen May

  University of Auckland

  8 shared

• Margit Feischmidt

  4 shared

• Jon Fox

  University of Bristol

  3 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Sociology

  University of California, Los Angeles

  1980

• M.A., Sociology

  University of California, Los Angeles

  1976

• B.A., Sociology

  University of California, Los Angeles

  1973

Awards & honors

• MacArthur Fellowship (1994-99)
• Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Scie…
• Fellowship from the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavio…
• Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundatio…
• Fellowship from the Wissenschaftskolleg of Berlin (2016-2017…

Similar researchers at University of California, Los Angeles

• Steven Claymanh-34
• Victor Agadjanianh-34
• Patrick Heuvelineh-29