Roger Keeran


Roger Keeran, also Roger Roy Keeran or Roger R. Keeran, is an American historian and university professor who taught successively at Cornell, Princeton, Rutgers and the New York State University. A specialist of Labor and Policy studies, he published, in 1980, The Communist Party and the Auto Workers' Unions and, in 2004, with co-author Thomas Kenny, Socialism Betrayed: Behind the Collapse of the Soviet Union, as well as various articles in history or sociology journals. He is now Professor Emeritus of the Empire State College at SUNY after retiring in 2013.

Biography

Education

In the 1960s, Keeran obtained a B.A. at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. To pay for his studies, he worked in a General Motors automobile plant. He was also co-president of the Detroit Committee to End the War in Vietnam. He next obtained an M.A. and a Ph.D. in history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His published thesis was titled Communists and Auto Workers: The Struggle for a Union, 1919-1941.

Academic career

In September 1973, he began his first teaching job at the ILR School at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Taking a keen interest in the work of Communist Party activists in the US automobile industry from the mid-1920s to the late 1940s, he published The Communist Party and the Auto Workers' Unions, which has since become a classic on the subject. However, the book’s academic approach to the purge of Communists from the United Auto Workers conflicted with US Cold War policies in effect at the time, and he lost his job at Cornell. He went on to teach at Princeton and Rutgers in New Jersey, as well as the Empire State School of the State University of New York, where he mentored students in the Labor and Policy studies master's degree program, before retiring in 2013 as Professor Emeritus.
In 2004, with labor economist Thomas Kenny, he co-authored Socialism Betrayed: Behind the Collapse of the Soviet Union, a book which in the ensuing years was to be translated into French, Portuguese, Spanish, Russian, Bulgarian, Turkish, Persian and Chinese. In the words of journalist Peter Symon in The Guardian, "Socialism Betrayed traces the many circumstances and deviations that undoubtedly contributed to the final overthrow of socialism and the dismemberment of the Soviet Union into many supposedly independent republics."
The first English edition was soon to be out of print mainly owing to the favorable publicity it garnered from reviews in left-wing newspapers and journals such as People's Weekly World, The Morning Star, Socialist Voice, People's Voice, The Spark, The Guardian, Australian Marxist Review, Marxistische Blaetter.

Political commitment

Keeran has been a member of the Communist Party USA for three decades, and is currently a member of the advisory board of the Marxist journal Science & Society.

His published work

Besides his two major books, Keeran has published a number of articles in history or sociology journals such as Michigan History, Labor History, Science & Society, Industrial Relations, Policy Studies Journal, Nature, Society, and Thought, and was a contributor to The Encyclopedia of the American Left.

Books