Rate My Professor Alexey Bessudnov

Alexey Bessudnov is an Associate Professor in the Department of Social and Political Sciences, Philosophy and Anthropology at the University of Exeter. He currently serves as Deputy Head of Department for Sociology, Philosophy and Anthropology from 2023 to 2026 and was Director of Education from 2019 to 2022. He joined the University in September 2014 as Lecturer in Quantitative Sociology, progressed to Senior Lecturer in 2017, and to Associate Professor in 2021. Previously, he held the position of Assistant Professor in Sociology at the National Research University Higher School of Economics in Moscow from 2011 to 2014 and was a Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence from 2010 to 2011. Bessudnov earned his DPhil in Sociology from the University of Oxford in 2011 at St Antony’s College, MA in Sociology from the European University at St Petersburg in 2004, and Diploma in History from St Petersburg State University in 2003.

Bessudnov’s research examines ethnic groups, categories, immigration, and inequalities in education and the labour market in Russia and the UK, utilizing quantitative methods on diverse data sources including surveys, administrative records, social media, and experiments. He has been Principal Investigator on the British Academy grant “Ethnic groups in the Russian labour market” (2016-2019) and Co-Investigator on ESRC and Nuffield Foundation projects evaluating school inclusion and reading interventions (2015-2018). Notable publications include “Ethnic hierarchy and public attitudes towards immigrants in Russia” (European Sociological Review, 2016), “The myth about universal higher education: Russia in the international context” (Educational Studies, 2017), “Ethnic Discrimination in Multi-ethnic Societies: Evidence from Russia” (European Sociological Review, 2020), “Ethnic and regional inequalities in Russian military fatalities in Ukraine: Preliminary findings from crowdsourced data” (Demographic Research, 2023), and “Predicting perceived ethnicity with data on personal names in Russia” (Journal of Computational Social Science, 2023). At Exeter, he teaches social analysis, immigration, and statistical data analysis, and supervises PhD students researching ethnic inequalities in education. He also serves as a reviewer for journals such as the American Sociological Review, European Sociological Review, and Social Forces.