Julia Adeney Thomas
Professor, Department of History
434 Decio Hall
Notre Dame, IN 46556
Office: 470 Decio Hall
Phone: 574-631-7266
jthomas2@nd.edu
Website
Research Interests: Concepts of nature in Japanese political ideology, the impact of the climate crisis on historiography, and photography as a political practice
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.