Douglas Rogers

Presidential Candidate

Douglas Rogers is Professor of Anthropology at Yale University, where he is completing a term as the inaugural Faculty Director of Yale’s reestablished Program in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies.  

Rogers’s training in Russian studies and Anthropology began with a B.A. from Middlebury College (1995). He then completed an M. Phil. in Social and Cultural Anthropology at Oxford University (1997), and an M.A. in Russian and East European Studies (2002) and Ph.D. in Anthropology (2004), both from the University of Michigan. He was a student at Moscow State University in 1994 and at the Medieval Slavic Summer Institute at The Ohio State University in 1999.  

Rogers’s research interests have included religion and ethics, oil and energy, and, most recently, the history of corporations in Russia and the global—especially Soviet and post-Soviet—history of petroleum science and technology. He is the author of two books, both based on extensive ethnographic and archival research in the Russian Perm’ region. The Old Faith and the Russian Land: A Historical Ethnography of Ethics in the Russian Urals (Cornell, 2009) received honorable mentions for the ASEEES Davis Center Prize and the Society for the Anthropology of Religion’s Clifford Geertz Prize. The Depths of Russia: Oil, Power, and Culture after Socialism (Cornell, 2015) won the ASEEES Davis Center and Ed A. Hewett Prizes and received an honorable mention for the Wayne S. Vucinich Prize. In 2021, Academic Studies Press/Bibliorossika published a Russian translation of The Depths of Russia in their “Contemporary Western Rusistika” Series, under the title Nedra Rossii: Vlast’, Neft’, i Kul’tura posle Sotsializma. These and other research projects have 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., and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. 

From 2011-2019, along with Catriona Kelly and Mark D. Steinberg, Rogers co-edited the Eurasia Past and Present book series at Yale University Press, and from 2011-13 he served on the SSRC Eurasia Council Selection and Advisory Board. Rogers joined the ASEEES Board of Directors from 2011-2014 as American Anthropological Association representative, during which time he proposed and helped to establish the ASEEES First Book Subvention Program. He is currently collaborating with colleagues to create REEESNe, a network of colleges and universities in the U.S. Northeast that will link undergraduate-facing programs at institutions of very different types that, despite their geographical proximity, rarely share expertise and strategies for attracting and retaining the next generation of students interested in this area of the world.   

In addition to his time directing Yale’s REEES Program, Rogers’s service at Yale University has included a term as an elected member of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Senate, including membership on the Senate’s Diversity and Inclusivity and Peer Advisory Committees and a year as Deputy Chair. He is beginning a term as Chair of Yale’s Anthropology Department. 

Rogers supports and is committed to extending ASEEES’s work to increase internationalization, inclusivity, and diversity within the organization and the field more broadly.