Modern Languages & Literatures Events
[PAST EVENT] CANCELED: Tepper Lecture Series “Empire and Memory”
Access & Features
- Open to the public
CANCELED: Please join us for another edition of our Tepper Lecture Series, sponsored by Tepper fund, with Professor Douglas Rogers on April 2, 2020 at 5 pm in Tucker Hall Room 127A.
Douglas Rogers, Professor of Anthropology at Yale University, will give a talk titled: “How and Why to Make Oil into Food: A Tale of Soviet Biotechnology and Human-Microbe Relations.”
Douglas Rogers is a sociocultural anthropologist with research and teaching interests in political and economic anthropology; natural resources (especially oil) and energy; corporations; the anthropology of religion and ethics; historical anthropology; and socialist societies and their postsocialist trajectories. His archival and ethnographic research in Russia has led to 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 is currently working on two projects. The first, Eating Oil: Energy and Life in and after the Cold War, is about the history and present-day reverberations of petroleum science in the Soviet Union, the United States, and Europe, including oil-into-food (“petroprotein”) programs; oil- and methane-eating bacteria; hydrocarbon microbiology and biotechnology more broadly; and debates about oil’s biogenic and/or abiogenic origins. The second is a study of the history, theory, and practice of the Russian and Soviet corporation.