Center for Philosophy, Politics, and Economics

Melvin Rogers

Associate Director, Center for Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, Professor of Political Science

Biography

Melvin Rogers is Professor of Political Science at Brown University. He has wide-ranging interests in contemporary democratic theory and the history of American and African-American political thought. 

He is the author of The Undiscovered Dewey: Religion, Morality, and the Ethos of Democracy (Columbia University Press, 2008) and The Darkened Light of Faith: Race, Democracy, and Freedom in African American Political Thought (Princeton University Press, 2023). He is the editor of John Dewey, The Public and its Problems (Ohio University Press, 2016) and co-editor (with Jack Turner) of African American Political Thought: A Collected History (University of Chicago Press, 2021), a collection of 30 essays on figures in the tradition of African American political thoughtHis articles have appeared in major academic journals and popular venues such as Dissentthe AtlanticPublic Seminar, and Boston Review

In addition to his published writings, Professor Rogers serves as the co-editor of the Oxford New Histories of Philosophy book series. The series focuses on the unattended voices in the history of philosophy.
He received an M.Phil in Political Thought and Intellectual History from Cambridge in 2000 and a Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale University in 2006.