Douglas Rogers is Professor of Anthropology at Yale University. His research and teaching interests are in political, economic, and historical anthropology; natural resources (especially oil) and energy; corporations; science and technology studies; the anthropology of religion and ethics; and socialist societies and their postsocialist trajectories.

Rogers’s archival and ethnographic research in Russia has led to many articles and 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).

From 2018-2021 Rogers directed Yale’s Program in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies, managing a series of four Carnegie Corporation grants to enhance and institutionalize Russian and Eurasian Studies at Yale. Together with Asia Neupane and Ian MacMillan, he founded REEESNe, The Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies Northeast Network. Since 2021, Rogers has served as Chair of Yale’s Department of Anthropology.

Rogers is currently working on Eating Oil: An Earthly History, a book about microbes that metabolize hydrocarbons and the humans, states, and corporations who have discovered, researched, cared for, grown, sold, killed, and otherwise related to them. Ranging across Soviet, European, and North American sites, the book deepens our knowledge of the natural and cultural history of hydrocarbons and life on Earth and suggest new possibilities for reckoning with that history in the present.

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. He is a 2024 Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.