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Julia Adeney Thomas

Julia Adeney Thomas

Professor

Email
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.

Her most recent books are Altered Earth: Getting the Anthropocene Right (Cambridge University Press, 2022); The Anthropocene: A Multidisciplinary Approach, co-authored with geologists Jan Zalasiewicz and Mark Williams (Polity, 2020); a co-edited collection, Visualizing Fascism: The Twentieth-Century Rise of the Global Right (Duke 2020); and, with Jan Zalasiewicz, Strata and Three Stories (Rachel Carson Center, Munich, 2020).  She's currently at work on The Historian's Task in the Anthropocene (under contract with Princeton University Press).
 
Before joining the history faculty at Notre Dame, Thomas taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of Wisconsin, Madison where she received tenure in 2001. She has also been a visiting scholar at the University of Bielefeld (Germany), the University of Bristol (U.K.), the Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte in Berlin, the Universität Heidelberg, and the University of Michigan as well as a member of the University of Wisconsin Humanities Institute, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
 
Her research has been supported by the Mellon Foundation "New Directions" Fellowship, the Japan Foundation, the NEH, Mombusho (Japanese Ministry of Education), the Social Science Research Council, the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science, and the ACLS.

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 

"Why the Anthropocene is not Climate Change and Why it Matters" https://www.asiaglobalonline.hku.hk/anthropocene-climate-change/
 
"History and Biology in the Anthropocene: Problems of Scale, Problems of Value"The American Historical Review, December 2014  https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/119.5.1587

"Power Made Visible: Photography and Postwar Japan's Elusive Reality," Journal of Asian Studies, May 2008  https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021911808000648

Reconfiguring Modernity: Concepts of Nature in Japanese Political Ideology  (University of California Press, 2001) https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520228542/reconfiguring-modernity
 
 

CV