Thomas D. RogersProfessor and Associate Chair & Mentor Coordinator
Tom Rogers, Professor (B.A., Williams College; Ph.D., Duke University) and Associate Department Chair and Mentor Coordinator. Modern Latin American history, especially Brazil; labor and environmental history.
In recent years, I have worked on labor and environmental history in the context of agricultural modernization and biofuels. My 2022 book Agriculture’s Energy: The Trouble with Ethanol in Brazil’s Green Revolution, examines Brazil’s rapid 20th century agricultural modernization. I use a singular initiative from 1975—the National Alcohol Program, which incentivized the production of sugarcane ethanol as fuel—as a vehicle to explore some consequences of this rapid rural transformation. Along with my co-author Jeffrey T. Manuel, I explore the transnational history of ethanol in The Perennial Alternative: The History of Ethanol in the U.S. and Brazil and Lessons for a Renewable Energy Future. The University of Oklahoma Press will bring out this book in 2025. My first book, The Deepest Wounds: A Labor and Environmental History of Sugar in Northeast Brazil, ranged across labor and environmental history in a study of agro-environmental change in the sugarcane region of the northeastern Brazilian state of Pernambuco.
I am currently working on a project examining Brazil’s political, economic, and cultural transition of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. The country emerged from 21 years of military dictatorship and moved away from state-led approaches to economic development. I am interested in the entanglements between these processes and how they were lived and perceived by the working class.
Current Graduate Students
Recently-Appointed Doctoral Graduates
