Department of History - Carnegie Mellon University

Faculty

Roger Rouse

Rank: Associate Teaching Professor
Ph.D.: Stanford University, 1989
Department Member Since: 2006

Professor Rouse’s work is concerned broadly with theoretical and empirical issues related to the cultural politics of class dynamics. He is particularly interested in how the restructuring of capitalism along neoliberal lines has been played out and experienced over the last four decades in Mexico and the United States. He has pursued these interests through historical and ethnographic research with people involved since the 1940s in migration between rural west-central Mexico and various parts of the United States, most notably California’s Silicon Valley. This research has led to continuing work on the ways we theorize and conceptualize processes of migration, with a particular emphasis on the significance of class trajectories and processes of subjectification, the interplay of class and gender dynamics, and the formation of transnational social fields. Reflecting his interest in work at the intersection of history, anthropology and cultural studies, Professor Rouse is currently engaged in a broader, non-ethnographic project that relates shifts in dominant forms of cultural production in the United States since the early 1980s to the growing emphasis on specifically neoliberal and transnational processes of capital accumulation.

Selected Publications

“Thinking Through Transnationalism: Notes on the Cultural Politics of Class Relations in the Contemporary United States,” Public Culture 7 (2) (1995).

“Questions of Identity: Personhood and Collectivity in Transnational Migration to the United States,” Critique of Anthropology 15 (4) (1995).

“Making Sense of Settlement: Class Formation, Cultural Struggle and Transnationalism Among Mexican Migrants in the United States,” New York Academy of Sciences vol. 645 (1992).

“Mexican Migration and the Social Space of Postmodernism,” Diaspora 1 (1) (1991).