Thomas D. RogersProfessor
Tom Rogers, Professor (B.A., Williams College; Ph.D., Duke University). 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 co-author Jeffrey T. Manuel and I explore this at the transnational scale in Ethanol: A Hemispheric History for the Future of Biofuels, a 2025 book from the University of Oklahoma Press. 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 the country’s rapid rural transformation. My first book, The Deepest Wounds: A Labor and Environmental History of Sugar in Northeast Brazil, studied agro-environmental change in the sugarcane region of the northeastern Brazilian state of Pernambuco.
I am currently working on two projects. One investigates Brazil’s political, economic, and cultural transition of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, when the country emerged from 21 years of military dictatorship and moved away from state-led approaches to economic development. I am looking for the entanglements between these processes and how they were lived and perceived by the working class. The other project features a collaboration with Emory biologist Arri Eisen on multidisciplinary conceptualizations of memory, from the molecular to the historical. Rooted in interviews with experts, our book will offer accessible insights into the complexities of memory.
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