Douglas Rogers is Professor of Anthropology at Yale University. His research and teaching interests lie in political and economic anthropology; natural resources (especially oil) and energy; corporations; the anthropology of religion and ethics; historical anthropology; and socialist societies and their postsocialist trajectories. His archival and ethnographic research in Russia has led to two award-winning books: The Old Faith and the Russian Land: A Historical Ethnography of Ethics in the Urals (Cornell, 2009) and The Depths of Russia: Oil, Power, and Culture After Socialism (Cornell, 2015). He has directed Yale’s Program in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (2018-21) and currently serves as Chair of Anthropology.

Rogers is currently working on two projects. The first, Eating Oil: Energy and Life in and after the Cold War, is about the history and present-day reverberations of petroleum science in the Soviet Union, the United States, and Europe, including oil-into-food (“petroprotein”) programs; oil- and methane-eating bacteria; hydrocarbon  microbiology and biotechnology more broadly; and debates about oil’s biogenic and/or abiogenic origins. The second is a study of the history, theory, and practice of the Russian and Soviet corporation.

Rogers received his B.A. from Middlebury College, an M.Phil. in Social and Cultural Anthropology from Oxford University, and a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Michigan. His research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, the National Science Foundation, the National Council on Eurasian and East European Research, the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and other organizations.