Ryan Cecil Jobson is an anthropologist and social critic of the Caribbean and the Americas. His research and teaching engage issues of energy and extractivism, states and sovereignty, climate and crisis, race and capital.

His first book, The Petro-state Masquerade: Oil, Sovereignty, and Power in Trinidad and Tobago (The University of Chicago Press, 2024) is a historical ethnography of fossil fuel industries and postcolonial state building. Excavating more than a century of commercial oil, gas, and petrochemical development in the twin-island Caribbean nation, Jobson theorizes how the tenuous relationship between hydrocarbons and political power—enshrined in the hyphenated form of the petro-state—is upheld through a “masquerade of permanence” sustained by speculative offshore and deepwater extraction. Meanwhile, working-class Trinbagonians play a mas of their own—in the form of strikes, protests, and the Carnival road march—to stage direct democratic alternatives to the fossil economy.

Elsewhere, Jobson penned an introduction to a new edition of Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Peasants and Capital: Dominica in the World Economy (Hau Books, 2025). His introduction returns to Trouillot’s debut ethnography more than thirty-five years after its initial publication, situating Peasants and Capital in the context of Trouillot’s remarkable life and career. Moreover, Jobson demonstrates how the entanglement of peasants from Dominica in national and world affairs has been impacted by more recent histories, such as the end of preferential markets for Caribbean bananas, the migration of “banana children” to regional and metropolitan urban centers, and the devastation of Dominica by Hurricane Maria.

He is at work on two subsequent projects: A monograph-length study of the late political thought of the Trinidadian polymath C.L.R. James, provisionally entitled C.L.R. James and the Question of Power, and a book manuscript on anthropological theory and method in an era of climate extinction.

At the University of Chicago, Jobson holds faculty appointments in the Committee on Environment, Geography, and Urbanization (CEGU), Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Committee on International Relations, Nicholson Center for British Studies, and the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity. He is co-editor-in-chief of the journal Transforming Anthropology and sits on the editorial board of Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism. Jobson earned his PhD in African American Studies and Anthropology from Yale University in 2017.