About

Professor Douglas Rogers is a faculty member at Yale University, holding the title of Professor of Anthropology. His work involves engaging with graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, serving as adviser, co-adviser, or dissertation committee member for numerous Yale PhD students. His academic interests and contributions include research on Russian history and culture, as evidenced by his publications such as 'The Depths of Russia' and 'The Old Faith and the Russian Land.' He has also hosted postdoctoral fellows in the REEES Program at Yale's Macmillan Center, indicating his active role in mentoring emerging scholars in his field.

Research topics

• Political Science
• History
• Economic history
• Law
• Computer Science
• Law and economics
• Art history
• Classics
• Art
• Library science
• Management
• Economics

Selected publications

• Rethinking energy materialities in the shadow of Russia's war on Ukraine

  Energy Research & Social Science · 2024-08-16 · 11 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Introduction

  Hau Journal of Ethnographic Theory · 2024-09-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This article introduces thirteen reflections on the scholarly contributions of anthropologist Katherine Verdery, Julien J. Studley Faculty Scholar and Distinguished Professor Emerita at the City University of New York Graduate Center’s Department of Anthropology. Although Verdery is perhaps best known for her work on socialist and postsocialist societies, we draw attention to some additional remarkable aspects of Verdery’s scholarship over the decades: her determination to hold ethnographic particularity together with a focus on regional and global processes; her ability to adapt to changes in her sites and topics of research and her fields of scholarship; her meticulous creativity; and, above all, her willingness—indeed, her delight—in sharing all of this virtuoso skill with her many students and colleagues.

  PublisherDOI

• The Inquiry Initiative and “Opportunity Gaps”: Collaborative Research Structures and Challenging Inequities in Teacher Education

  The New Educator · 2024-10-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Pigs, Wheat, Whales, and other Nonhumans in Russia and the Soviet Union

  The Russian Review · 2023-04-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Red Leviathan: The Secret History of Soviet Whaling by Ryan Tucker Jones, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2022. xviii + 279 pp. $30.00. ISBN 978-0-22662885-1 Black Earth, White Bread: A Technopolitical History of Russian Agriculture and Food by Susanne Wengle, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. 2022. xxi + 309 pp. $79.95. ISBN 978-0-29933540-3 At the center of the two books under review sit relationships between humans and groups of other species, varieties of wheat and pigs for Susanne Wengle and whales for Ryan Tucker Jones. By lingering on underexplored entanglements between humans and nonhumans, and by emphasizing the agency and subjectivity of those nonhumans, both books add to our understandings of agriculture, food, industrialized hunting, and “nature” more broadly. They also inch Russian studies closer to the proliferating interdisciplinary scholarship that has adopted the banner of multispecies studies. Scholars in and of Russia have long drawn attention to the ways in which humans, crops, and animals have been arranged in some uncommon and consequential ways in this part of the world. These scholars’ efforts might be grouped into four rough categories. First, relationships among—and hybrids of—species feature prominently in arts and literature. Jane Costlow and Amy Nelson’s Other Animals: Beyond the Human in Russian Culture and History admirably brings together a range of such interventions, which extend from prerevolutionary folkloristics and accounts of the intimacies of village life to Mayakovsky’s writings and sketches (in which “the human and the animal could readily change places”), and from there to post-Soviet “humanimals” such as Tatyana Tolstaya’s The Slynx and Moscow Actionist Oleg Kulik’s performances as a human dog.1 Second, in a scholarship largely produced by ethnographers and anthropologists, shamans, hunters, and other residents of Siberia or the Russian North are understood as specialists in the porous boundaries among species. The “dramatis personae” in Piers Vitebsky’s The Reindeer People include “a one-eyed dog who can see into the future,” and Rane Willerslev’s Soul Hunters opens with an evocative image of “Old Spiridon,” one of Willerslev’s Yukaghir interlocutors, rocking back and forth, half-garbed in elk furs and skins, “not an elk, but also not not an elk … occupying a strange place between the human and the nonhuman.”2 In these two strands—call them literary/artistic and shamanic—we find creative explorations of the often highly fluid boundaries and makeup of the human and the nonhuman. The third strand takes up human-nonhuman relationships through the history of science. Although all manner of biological, microbiological, zoological, and ecological stories have been and will be told here, the Lysenko saga continues to function as something of a black hole, pulling all manner of studies of Soviet science—well beyond theories of evolution and genetics—into its orbit.3 A fourth strand in which nonhuman species feature prominently is in the history and social science of Soviet agriculture and industry. Measured in linear feet of library shelving, this strand dwarfs the other three put together, for it opens easily into discussions of the grand questions and debates about Russian and Soviet politics and economics. Here we find, for instance, studies of crop yields in collective and state farms, of cattle and pigs slaughtered rather than given over to the kolkhoz, of attempts to industrialize the hunting of reindeer, elk, or fish, of Soviet efforts to overcome perpetual agricultural shortages, and of early post-Soviet “demodernization” of rural life experienced as growth in the scope and scale of domestic pig and cattle raising. Wengle’s and Jones’s books fall most clearly and obviously into this fourth strand—with healthy infusions of the third (history of science)—but they stand apart for their insistence that nonhuman species are agents and subjects, too.4 In their attention to multi-agential and intersubjective relationships among species, Wengle and Jones thus nudge the third and fourth strands of scholarship I have sketched out closer to the themes of the first and second. For both authors, attention to technology is central to their interventions. Susanne Wengle’s Black Earth, White Bread is a contribution to the political science and history of agriculture. The book’s central analytical device is technopolitics: “the support of and reliance on agricultural technologies—from tractors to CRISPR techniques—in policy regimes that seek to realize particular political goals and utopias. A technopolitical regime is forged by privileged agents of change and the technologies they employ to grow crops and raise animals” (p. 8). A first-glance reading of this definition might not distinguish it much from, for instance, teleological modernization theories (Soviet and otherwise) in which “better” or more efficient agricultural technologies improve life. This is far from Wengle’s intent. Technopolitics, for her, eschews causal or reductive accounts of agency and, instead, illuminates mutual implications, dynamic interactions, and unintended consequences. This approach opens the field of agency in the agricultural sector beyond its usual population, especially by admitting consumers and nature as classes of agents that have gone underappreciated in the weight of existing scholarship on the Soviet Union and Russia.5 The heart of Black Earth, White Bread is four substantive chapters devoted to four agents of agricultural technopolitics: political actors, producers, consumers, and nature. Wengle suggests these chapters can be read in any order, a “choose your own adventure” structure that is in line with her overall approach to technopolitics as a multi-causal and non-reductive arena for analysis. I will suggest that Wengle’s approach to nature as agent is among her most innovative contributions, and so I take up her invitation to read in any order and present these chapters as follows: nature, consumers, political actors, and, finally, producers. “Nature” is an expansive and unwieldy category as agent, and Wengle moves quickly to narrow her focus in this chapter to the human-nature nexus constituted by the science and technology of breeding—the human-assisted creation of desirable varieties within species of flora and fauna. A longue-durée view of strategies for breeding wheat and pigs, Wengle argues, suggests an overarching trend: while Soviet agricultural and food science concentrated on breeding for regional ecological niches—tailoring the variety of wheat or the breed of pig to the environmental conditions of the state or collective farms that specialized in them—post-Soviet agroholdings, with their massive capital investments and equally massive scales of operations, have left behind such niches in order to concentrate on breeds that will generate the largest possible yields and profits across niches. Although this is truer in the controlled and confined habitats of industrial pig farming than in the open-to-the-local-elements grain business, the general trend crosses the agricultural and food sector. This recent move away from ecological niches, Wengle goes on to show, also points to the ways in which breeding as nexus of human-nature agency is not limited to the sciences and technologies that push and pull natural selection. The breeding nexus in the post-Soviet period is, in fact, generating enormous technopolitical vulnerabilities that are best seen as significantly expanding the field of agency. Less niche-driven breeding strategies create vulnerabilities to pathogens, to geopolitical upheavals, to sanctions, to an oil-dependent ruble, and more. Indeed, Wengle argues, in what approaches the end of the book in her ordering of chapters, this overdetermined vulnerability is the most appropriate lens through which all key actors, “knowingly or not” (and, I think it is safe to add, human or not), are moving at the current conjuncture (p. 211). It is notable that Wengle’s emphasis on vulnerability comes into focus most clearly in this chapter, at the species-level interactions that constitute breeding—a point to which I return below. Consumers make for Wengle’s second less-commonly treated group of agents in agricultural technopolitics. Although factors ranging from the Soviet Union’s own emphasis on production to Western social historians’ Marxian inclinations might once have relegated consumption to the periphery of scholarly topics, Wengle’s own comprehensive review and orchestration of what is now a massive literature on food, agriculture, and consumption demonstrates that this has not been the case for a long while. Under the three rubrics of availability, access, and allure, Wengle treats changing patterns of consumption across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and her discussion touches on everything from the menus of Second World War soldiers to the symbolism of post-Soviet fast food, and from the centrality of kitchens in Cold War international politics to the popularity of post-Cold War cooking shows in Russia. Technopolitics appears somewhat more in the background of this discussion than in other chapters, but a central tension emerges that, in various guises, will be familiar to many readers. Wengle discerns a movement toward the consumption of more and more industrially processed foods punctuated by occasional (and sometimes precipitous, as in the 1990s) reversions to decidedly low-technology domestic production. Coming to this discussion from the nature chapter, it is hard not to dwell on the ways in which vulnerability appears here. Although dependence on subsistence farming has decreased in the Putin era as compared to the 1990s, it remains the case that most rural residents of Russia are not far removed from the knowledge and practice of decidedly un-industrially processed food. We are accustomed to thinking of this vulnerability as political, but it is just as clearly, and for Wengle inextricably, situated at a technopolitical, human-nature nexus. Chapter 1 is dedicated to governance and political actors, or “the ‘politics’ part of the technopolitics of Russian agriculture” (p. 40). It takes readers through some of the most familiar terrain of Soviet and Russian agricultural history: the long succession of state efforts to solve the grain problem. Wengle’s orchestration of multiple factors is again impressive, and she treats state campaigns and policies from the Revolution through the Putin era along the axes of price, land, and trade. The techno side of technopolitcs—from tractors to high-yield seeds—plays a vital but, once again, non-determinative role in this chapter. The closest Wengle comes to a general claim that approaches variable-driven or causal modes of analysis is the suggestion that, in broad strokes, “technopolitical regimes in agriculture succeed if the material technologies, nature, and social actors perform as expected and as designed [but] fail when the social organization and material technologies are too costly to sustain in the long run, or if they are too vulnerable to environmental changes and social pressures” (p. 44). Reading forward through the book will considerably nuance and reframe this claim as the chapters move on; reading the book in 4-3-1-2 order, as presented here, shows with special force just how inadequate such abstracted claims are to the multiple assemblages that Wengle is tracking. While grain is the focus of Wengle’s governance discussion, pigs take center stage in her treatment of production. Agricultural production is already a heavily trafficked area of Russian and Soviet studies, but Wengle’s orchestration of material in this chapter, coupled with her technopolitical lens, yields some noteworthy points. First, it revisits the old dynamic between industrialized agriculture and subsistence farming to show that both were more thoroughly entangled in global agrotechnical transformations (and technopolitics) than is commonly understood. Although most of these entanglements involved Soviet efforts to implement European and Western technologies, Wengle insists that these flows were bi-directional, adding her voice to a series of studies that have re-inserted the Soviet economy into the global economy.6 Second, Wengle’s long-term vision pays off handsomely in this chapter, and she argues that the rise of agroholdings in the Putin era has had a transformative effect on the Russian countryside paralleled only by Stalin-era collectivization. This transformation has been similarly comprehensive in its technological shifts, although this time they involve not just new tractors, combines, and farm complexes but pharmacological, biotechnological, and information technology dimensions. A technopolitical study of Wengle’s sort, with its multiply implicated actors, unintended as well as intended consequences, and underdetermined outcomes, cannot conclude by tying things into a neat bow or by pointing to a single actor or configuration of variables. Indeed, to undermine those kinds of too-neat analyses is very much the goal. But Wengle’s conclusion does move beyond merely restating the indeterminacies of her approach to suggesting additional perspectives that might follow from it, chief among them “new vulnerabilities.” Here, in conclusion, she adds to the roster of breeding-centered vulnerabilities covered in the “nature” chapter (pathogens, geopolitics, petro-dependency, and sanctions) a new and related set: inequality, obesity, and waste—all vulnerabilities, she suggests, that have much longer histories in the capitalist West. Climate change and war are not on her list, but the roadmap by which they might be added to is clear enough. Technopolitics, by the end of this book, is not just about multiple agencies, causalities, and determinations. At least at the current global moment, they are also about the co-production and the co-inhabitation of multispecies vulnerabilities. Ryan Tucker Jones’s Red Leviathan: The Secret History of Soviet Whaling spans the rise and fall of Soviet whaling. It is a “secret history” in part because it was a secretive history, with the Soviet Union’s habitual breaking of international whaling regulations, treaties, and quotas long hidden from view. (By Jones’s estimate, roughly half of the 600,000 whales killed by the Soviet whaling fleet in the twentieth century were killed in contravention of international agreements.) Like Wengle, Jones gives significant weight to technological changes in shaping, if not determining, human-whale hunting interactions. One clear and consequential example is the 1922 invention of the slipway—an opening at the stern of the whaleship that enabled the steam-winching of an entire whale carcass inside for processing (replacing the older method of pulling the carcass on deck with levers and pullies). The slipway not only made the onerous work of disassembling the whale more efficient and safer for the crew but contributed a technological dimension to Soviet whaling’s secret history by obscuring the butchering from view. The slipway features in Jones’s arresting Preface, which recounts the 1976 “turning point” encounter between Greenpeace activists in Zodiac rafts and the massive Soviet whaling vessel Dal'nii Vostok off the coast of California. Head of Greenpeace Bob Hunter had the Dal'nii Vostok’s slipway in mind when he recalled that, “here was a beast that fed itself through its anus, and it was into this inglorious hole that the last of the world’s whales were vanishing—before our eyes” (p. ix). With this scene, the Preface effectively introduces a thread of human-whale relationships that runs through the book. Jones makes it clear that he himself is no less than Bob Hunter by the of and of both evocative and Jones’s at the of whales in many a point in the book, for instance, Jones takes of the that a Soviet once a book of suggesting that he find more information in it than in all Red is with a of the in Jones suggests, … the of state Russian attempts to them to the whaling of European at the time (p. Jones the early Soviet period through the global of the the of the Soviet whaling the first to feature that key of technological the stern its notable of in and By the the into an of hunting in the North rough and the for its to rise and rise much for the and of the whale World War some for the world’s and when the Soviet whaling fleet to the in the it so in a Cold War in with other international whaling and in hunting the It was not long this international with of that were not limited to the Soviet the and the North by Soviet again Jones the end of Soviet whaling here, a he to a of North international which whaling to a than in a international environmental and movement by those Greenpeace the massive Dal'nii The last Soviet to a whale was on The of Jones’s of the and of the Soviet whaling the the of chapters that, together, focus on human-whale are here. The Soviet whaling fleet more into its whaling than any of the international at the to whale to make about everything from patterns to the at which were These put them in an to that the to an for the whaling with on international science not fail the whaling or the world’s But the and the (p. By the and Soviet were that, read by their international clearly that Soviet were other as much on the of international In the opening to one of these chapters on the Jones recounts own with whales that it to think about whales had of their own to the Soviet whale This scene, in fact, the consequential chapter most on whale and Jones a of both Soviet and with the of what Soviet to about their as well as what they by only whales that were for their But it is Jones argues, that Soviet well that they were animal and Although Soviet to this Jones also points out that they to have seen in whale a image of their own their own (and of the chapter on in the whale and whale into the of life in and Although Soviet accustomed to whale of whale in as of the and of whaling for an expansive of Soviet whaling that and and and Jones that “the relationships with these animals an between the and the between and and (p. These are as they there is also a that comes from Jones’s to Soviet whale hunting a or on this somewhat The of is clear in its politics of whales into a category of and that many for but once Jones makes that much more to to the and in these of and other for instance, are of of and that might have been to relationships between Soviet humans and the world’s to what it might have to at once and Wengle and Jones make moves with to existing analyses of humans and nature in Russian studies. their to of Soviet and other recent studies, both in the Soviet period the of of human-nature relationships that might be over and between humans and their own as for other and which Wengle to her emphasis on vulnerabilities and Jones to the of Soviet and attention to vulnerability and are only two of a many ways in which studies of human-nonhuman relationships in Russia might along the general by these up questions might well to move closer to what I at the the literary/artistic and strands of about relationships between humans and other species in Russia. Jones’s of whale and if these much more than scholarship has Although Wengle Jones as much their of the agency and subjectivity of other species in non-reductive ways are also very much in the of an field at the of environmental and social field that as too from Russian is of at is the of The of and Culture and The and the Russian A of in the and is the history of and theories of the of

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• Introduction: The Imperial Russian Corporation in and beyond Economic History

  The Russian Review · 2022-05-20

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Preface: Credits, Claims, and Confessions

  Cornell University Press eBooks · 2022

  • Law and economics
  • Economics
  DOI

• The Corporation in Russia

  Laboratorium Russian Review of Social Research · 2021 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Library science
  • Computer Science

  This special issue of Laboratorium began as papers presented at a 2019 conference made possible in part by a Carnegie Corporation of New York grant to Yale University’s Program in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (no. G-19-57117). The Edward J. and Dorothy Kempf Memorial Fund and the European Studies Council at Yale University provided additional support. “The Russian Corporation/The Corporation in Russia” conference took up early modern and imperial corporations as well as the Soviet and post-Soviet corporations featured in this cluster, and I hope a group of articles on those topics will appear in another journal in due course. In composing this introduction, I have benefited from the memorably spirited engagement at the conference itself—interdisciplinary, international, and with expertise spanning four centuries—and the specific comments and suggestions of Elena Adasheva-Klein, Veronica Davidov, Egor Lazarev, Renata Mustafina, Agnieska Pasieka, and Lauren Woodard. The statements made and views expressed here remain my responsibility. Text in English DOI: 10.25285/2078-1938-2021-13-1-4-19

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• Baku: Oil and Urbanism. By Eve Blau. With Ivan Rupnik and Iwan Baan. Zurich, Switzerland: Park Books, 2018. 302 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Illustrations. Photographs. Figures. Maps. $49.00, paper.

  Slavic Review · 2020-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Baku: Oil and Urbanism. By Eve Blau. With Ivan Rupnik and Iwan Baan. Zurich, Switzerland: Park Books, 2018. 302 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Illustrations. Photographs. Figures. Maps. $49.00, paper. - Volume 79 Issue 3

  PublisherDOI

• Exchange of Views on the Article “In Search of the Global East” by Martin Müller

  Sotsiologicheskoe Obozrenie / Russian Sociological Review · 2020-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  This section presents exchanges between intellectuals from Eastern and Western Europe, Russia, and North America who kindly agreed to read and comment on Martin Mueller’s article “In Search of the Global East”, relying on the situation in their own academic disciplines, work experiences, and the twists and turns of their scientific research and creative challenges. Researchers, academic teachers, exhibition curators, writers, and architects reflect on the power and influence which geographical names exert on academic life, politics, and culture. Starting from Mueller’s article on the Global East, as well as his other text wherein he expresses his skepticism of the concept of post-socialism, the commentators, evaluating Mueller’s arguments critically, raise a number of fundamental questions. Among these questions is the need to historicize scientific concepts, the issue of the regularly-reproducible misunderstanding (or even exclusion) of the East by Western intellectuals, the tasks the inclusion of the Global East in the overall geographical picture will contribute to, as well as the question of whether the concern that the Global East is not sufficiently heard in the world is narrowly academic. This indirect debate between the author of the key text in this thematic issue and his commentators is significant as an episode of the joint search for a more democratic, creative, and inspiring future for the region that unites Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia.

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• Unfinished conversations: A tribute to Sonja Luehrmann (1975–2019)

  History and Anthropology · 2020 · 1 citations

  • History
  • Art history
  • Art

  Dedicated to Philipp (b. 2007), Vera (b. 2010), and Lukas (b. 2016).Sonja Luehrmann, anthropologist and historian, passed away from cancer in Vancouver Canada on August 24, 2019. As her colleagues ...

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Recent grants

• Oil Culture: Producing the New Russia

  NSF · $194k · 2009–2013

Frequent coauthors

• Dmitri Funk

  University of Washington

  4 shared

• Platon Shamayev

  Cornell University

  4 shared

• Ronald Schweitzer

  Monash University

  4 shared

• Diana Riboli

  Cornell University

  4 shared

• German Kenin-Lopsan

  University of Washington

  4 shared

• Valentina Diachkova

  University of Washington

  4 shared

• Sharafutdi Gulnaz

  University of Washington

  4 shared

• Alexei Pavlova

  University of Washington

  4 shared

Labs

• Douglas Rogers LabPI

Awards & honors

• 2024 Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation