Douglas Rogers

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Douglas Rogers, an associate professor of anthropology at Yale University, is a cultural anthropologist specializing in Russia. His research uses the massive changes of the post-Soviet period as a basis for contributions to theoretical conversations in the humanities and social sciences. He has written on topics as varied as religion, ethics, and political and economic transformations.

During his fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute, Rogers will work on “Oil Culture: Producing the New Russia,” a book that charts interactions among oil companies, state agencies, and cultural production in the Perm region of the Russian Urals over the past two decades. On the basis of interviews, archival research, and participant observation, he argues that Russia is a postsocialist petrostate, different in crucial respects from the largely postcolonial petrostates that populate existing scholarship. These differences, Rogers believes, will illuminate important dynamics in contemporary Russia and suggest some modifications in the ways scholars understand the nexus of culture, power, and oil in the modern world.

Rogers received his BA from Middlebury College and his PhD from the University of Michigan. His first book, The Old Faith and the Russian Land: A Historical Ethnography of Ethics in the Urals (Cornell University Press, 2009), received honorable mentions for the Clifford Geertz Prize in the Anthropology of Religion and the Davis Center Book Prize in Political and Social Studies. He has received research grants from the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and other organizations.