Expert in contemporary Russian nationalism, politics and the Russian economy, Professor Rutland has studied Russia and the former Soviet Union for over three decades. He is author of two books “The Politics of Economic Stagnation in the Soviet Union” and “The Myth of the Plan: Lessons of Soviet Planning Experience” and editor of four others. Rutland blogs at Nationalism Watch and has written for dozens of publications, including The New York Times (Nationalists or Islamists?), The Daily Mirror (Vladimir Putin actions in Ukraine are worrying – should we fear Russia nuclear power?) and Foreign Policy (Hong Kong Pride).
Rutland is working on the project “Visualizing the Nation” that explores how political nationalism is expressed in film, TV and online.
Author of 45 op-ed articles in the English-language weekly, Moscow Times, Rutland is an associate of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University (where he was a Mellon research fellow in the Russian Research Center). While on leave from Wesleyan in the 1990s, he was assistant director of the Open Media Research Institute associated with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Prague. Since 2013 he has been editor in chief of Nationalities Papers, the journal of the Association for the Study of Nationalities, along with serving as associate editor of Russian Review.
Peter Rutland has taught at Wesleyan in Middletown, Connecticut since 1989 and has also been a visiting professor at Columbia University and the University of Manchester, a visiting Fulbright professor at the European University in St. Petersburg and at Sophia University in Tokyo, and a visiting fellow at the University of York, the Australian National University, and Nanyang Technological University (Singapore). He is on the advisory board of the Comparative Politics Faculty at the Russian Presidential Academy of Economics and Public Administration in St. Petersburg.
Educated at Oxford (BA in Politics, Philosophy and Economics) and York (doctorate in sociology), he taught at the University of Texas at Austin, and at the University of York and London University in the UK before coming to Wesleyan.