Peter Rutland is professor of government and the Colin and Nancy Campbell Chair for Global Issues and Democratic Thought at Wesleyan University (Middletown, Conn.). An expert in contemporary Russian nationalism, politics, and economy, he has studied Russia and the former Soviet Union for over three decades. Recent articles cover topics such as Russian "soft power," the structure of the Russian political and economic elite, and US-Russia relations in the run-up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. He also studies nationalism, and is currently working on the project "Visualizing the nation," which explores how political nationalism has expressed itself through visual media – film, television and the internet.

Rutland is the 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, along with numerous scholarly articles and book chapters. He has taught at Wesleyan since 1989. Before that he taught at the University of Texas at Austin, and at the University of York and London University in the UK. He has a BA from Oxford and a D. Phil from York. He has also been a visiting professor at Columbia University, and is an associate of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University. From 2013-19 he was editor in chief of Nationalities Papers, the journal of the Association for the Study of Nationalities, and is currently associate editor of Russian Review. 

He was a visiting Fulbright professor at the European University in St. Petersburg in 2000 and at Sophia University in Tokyo in 2003. He was a visiting fellow at the University of York in 2014, Australian National University in summer 2015, and a Leverhulme Trust visiting professor at the University of Manchester in 2016.