Julia Adeney Thomas
Professor
- jthomas2@nd.edu
- Office
- 470 Decio
- Education
- Ph.D., University of Chicago
- Time Period(s)
- Modern
- Theme(s)
- Environmental, Intellectual, Political
- Geography(s)
- Asia, Global
Julia Thomas grew up in the coal country of southwest Virginia. Her sharp interest in environmental questions comes from her love of those mountains. As an intellectual historian of Japan, Thomas writes about concepts of nature and the Anthropocene, political thought, historiography, and photography as a political practice. Her publications include Reconfiguring Modernity: Concepts of Nature in Japanese Political Ideology (winner of the AHA John K. Fairbank Prize), Japan at Nature's Edge: The Environmental Context of a Global Power, and Rethinking Historical Distance and many essays, including three ("The Cataracts of Time: Wartime Images and the Case of Japan," "Not Yet Far Enough: The Environmental Turn" and "History and Biology in the Anthropocene: Questions of Scale, Questions of Value") in the American Historical Review.
Selected Publications:
Altered Earth: Getting the Anthropocene Right (Cambridge University Press, 2022) https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/altered-earth/0628D6DF58789AE459014CC8B0D45BB8
The Anthropocene: A Multidisciplinary Approach with Mark Williams and Jan Zalasiewicz (Polity, 2020) https://politybooks.com/bookdetail/?isbn=9781509534593
Visualizing Fascism: The Twentieth-century Rise of the Global Right (Duke, 2020) https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/2681/Visualizing-FascismThe-Twentieth-Century-Rise-of
Strata and Three Stories with Jan Zalasiewicz (Rachel Carson Center, 2020) http://www.environmentandsociety.org/perspectives/2020/3/strata-and-three-stories
"The Blame Game: Asia, Democracy, and Covid-19," https://www.asiaglobalonline.hku.hk/blame-game-asia-democracy-and-covid-19
"Power Made Visible: Photography and Postwar Japan's Elusive Reality," Journal of Asian Studies, May 2008 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021911808000648