Julia Adeney Thomas
Associate Professor of History
Field
Japan
Profile
Julia Thomas focuses on modern Japan. Her research concerns nature and the environment, museums and memory, and photography in intellectual and political history. Reconfiguring Modernity: Concepts of Nature in Japanese Political Ideology won the John K. Fairbank Prize from the American Historical Association in 2003, and her article on Japanese war memory in the American Historical Review won the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians' Best Article of the Year Award in 1999.
Her research has been generously supported by the Mellon “New Directions” Fellowship, the Japan Foundation, Mombusho (Japanese Ministry of Education), the Social Science Research Council and the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science (SSRC/JSPS) Postdoctoral Fellowship, and the ACLS/SSRC Advanced Research Grant among others.
Educated at Princeton, Oxford, and the University of Chicago, Julia Thomas taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of Wisconsin, where she received tenure in 2001 before joining the faculty of Notre Dame. She has also been a visiting scholar at the Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte in Berlin and a member of the University of Wisconsin Humanities Institute and of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
Current Project
Between Reality and Sex: Japanese Photography in War, Occupation, and After (tentative title; under contract to Harvard University Press)
Publications
Kindai no Saikochiku Japanese translation of Reconfiguring Modernity: Concepts of Nature in Japanese Political Ideology (Tokyo: Hosei University Press, January 2008)
Reconfiguring Modernity: Concepts of Nature in Japanese Political Ideology (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002)
“Power Made Visible: Photography and Postwar Japan’s Elusive Reality,” Journal of Asian Studies, 67, 2 (May 2008)
“The Showa Emperor and Photography: The Unreciprocated Gaze,” in Ben-Ami Shillony, ed., Handbook of the Emperors of Modern Japan (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2008)
“Weltgeschichte als japanische Selbst-Entdeckung” [World History as Japanese Self-Discovery] in Margarete Grandner, Dietmar Rothermund, and Wolfgang Schwentker, eds.,
Globalisierung und Globalgeschichte (Wien: Mandelbaum Verlag, 2005)
“'To become as one Dead': Nature and Political Subjectivity in Modern Japan" in Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal, eds. The Moral Authority of Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003)
“High Anxiety: World History as Japanese Self-Discovery” in Benedikt Stucktey and Eckhardt Fuchs, eds., Writing World History: 1800-2000 (German Historical Institute London and Oxford University Press, 2003)
“Nature, Japan, and the World History of Modernity” in James C. Baxter and Joshua A. Fogel, eds., Historiography and Japanese Consciousness of Norms and Values (Kyoto: Nichibunken, 2003)
"Photography, National Identity, and the 'Cataract of Times:' Wartime Images and the Case of Japan" reprinted in Genocide, Collective Violence, and Popular Memory: The Politics of Remembrance in the Twentieth Century (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2001)
"Globalization in Question: Japanese Photography in Contemporary America" in Harumi Befu and Sylvie Guichard-Anguis, eds., Globalizing Japan: Ethnography of the Japanese Presence in Asia, Europe, and America (Nissan Institute/Routledge, 2001)
"The Cage of Nature: Modernity's History in Japan,"History and Theory 40,1 (February 2001)
"History and Anti-History: Photography Exhibitions and Japan's National Identity" in Susan A. Crane, ed., Museums and Memory (Stanford University Press, June 2000)
"Springing the Trap of Modernity: A Review Essay of Stephen Vlastos's Mirror of Modernity," Osaka City University Economic Review 35, 1 (October 1999)
"Kindai to iu wana o hajikesaseru--Mirror of Modernity: Invented Traditions of Modern Japan--o megutte," Nihonshi kenkyu [Research in Japanese History] (August 1999)
"Photography, National Identity, and the 'Cataract of Times:' Wartime Images and the Case of Japan," American Historical Review 103, 5 (December 1998). Winner, Berkshire Conference of Women Historians' Best Article of the Year Award.
“Raw Photographs and Cooked History: Photography's Ambiguous Place in Tokyo's Museum of Modern Art," East Asian History 12 (December 1996)
“Naturalizing Nationhood: Ideology and Practice in Early Twentieth-Century Japan," in Sharon Minichiello, ed., Japan's Competing Modernities: Issues in Culture and Politics, 1900-1930 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1998)
"Women and Wine in Japan," Wine & Spirits (March 1988)
Contact
Office: 470 Decio Faculty Hall
Phone: (574) 631-0393
Email: thomas.165@nd.edu
Office Hours: TBA