Eating Oil: An Earthly History a project 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 project deepens our knowledge of the natural and cultural history of hydrocarbons and life on Earth and seeks new possibilities for reckoning with that history in the present.
Douglas Rogers is Professor of Anthropology at Yale University, with research and teaching interests in political, economic, and historical anthropology; oil and energy; corporations; and socialist societies and their postsocialist trajectories. His 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). Rogers’s 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, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and other organizations. He was a 2024 Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.
