RESEARCH INTERESTS
Twentieth-century East Central Europe; state socialism and post-socialism; Cold War history; labor, gender, and sexuality; Anthropocene, energy, and environmental history; mining
DISSERTATION
Lights Out: Mining Masculinity and Energy Crisis in Czechoslovakia, 1948-1992
BIOGRAPHY
Julia Mead is an environmental historian of modern Eastern Europe, with a particular focus on energy, gender, and labor. Her dissertation, “Lights Out: Mining Masculinity and Energy Crisis in Czechoslovakia, 1948-1992,” traces the rise and fall of the Czechoslovak coal economy from 1948 to 2004, and its relationship to changing norms of masculinity. She shows how coal miners in socialist Czechoslovakia achieved an elite social status, and how they lost it almost overnight during the transition to capitalism. She also has research interests in the history of household appliances, socialist women’s organizations, and energy infrastructure in the former Eastern Bloc. Before becoming a historian, Mead worked as a fact checker for The Nation and New York Magazine.
PUBLICATIONS
“The 1970s Energy Crises and the Threat to Czechoslovak Consumer Socialism,” Journal of Contemporary History, January 27, 2025 [online].
"The Kingdom of Antique Televisions: Reparability and the Afterlives of Socialist Electronics," Gender and Materiality in Central and Easter Europe in the 20th Century 9 (2023).
“What Has Socialism Ever Done for Women? Reflections on Women’s Emancipation in the Eastern Bloc,” with Kristen Ghodsee, Catalyst vol. 2 no. 1 (Summer 2018)
“Debating Gender in State Socialist Women’s Magazines: The Cases of Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia,” with Kristen Ghodsee, History of Communism in Europe vol. 8 (2017)
INTERESTS
19th Century U.S. West, Native American History, Settler Colonial Studies, and Material Culture
RESEARCH INTERESTS
Seventeenth and eighteenth century political, commercial, and social history of the East India Company in Western India (Bombay and Surat); early modern and modern South Asia, early modern Britain and its empire, Indian Ocean historiography, comparative imperialism and colonialism, urban history before 1800
DISSERTATION
The Imperial State and the Transformation of Bombay, c.1665-1765
RESEARCH INTERESTS
Early Modern Britain, Portugal, and the Sephardic Jewish diaspora
DISSERTATION
Inter-Imperial Trade in the Anglo-Iberian Atlantic, 1660-1720
DISSERTATION
‘A World of Energies, Forces, and Flows’: Architecture, Atmospheres, and Environment in Early Modern Italian City-States
RESEARCH INTERESTS
America in the World, U.S. military building, U.S.-East Asian relations, development, U.S. military empire, race, culture, the Korean War
DISSERTATION
To Make an Army: Militarized Modernity, Military Advisors, and the Genesis of U.S. Global Power
PUBLICATIONS
"The U.S. Has Never Known What to Do With Foreign Students," Foreign Policy Magazine, April 9, 2025.
"Afterlives of Orientalism: Corporal Punishment and U.S. Military-Building in Korea," Diplomatic History, 26 August 2024.
"The True Horseman of the ‘Fallout’ Apocalypse," Foreign Policy Magazine, May 18, 2024.
"Can the U.S. Rewrite Its Tortured History of Aid to the Philippines? A military long shaped by Washington’s priorities now needs to modernize," Foreign Policy Magazine, August 31, 2023.
“Interpreting Empire: English, U.S. Advisors, and Interpreters in the Korean War,” Journal of American-East Asian Relations vol. 29 n. 4 (2022): 365-390.
AWARDS
RESEARCH INTERESTS
History of anarchism and radical community organizing; anarchism as practice/lifestyle; labor history; history of everyday and social life; French and Francophone history; comparative urban history and theory, with a focus on Paris and Chicago; history of utopian thought and practice; gender history; political theory
DISSERTATION
The Right to the Radical City: Public Space, Public History, and Prefigurative Politics in Chicago and Paris, 1870s-1940s
PUBLICATIONS
“To ‘Labour with a Greater Sense of Safety’: First Aid, Civic Duty, and Risk Management in the British Working Class, 1870-1914.” Journal of Social History, vol. 54, no. 2 (2020): 526-545. With Alisa Bajramovic, Isabel Miller, Chelsea Pan, Emily Ratté, and Anton Vicente Kliot.
“‘Pure Means’ and the Possibilities of the Past: Walter Benjamin, Strikes, and the Intersections of Theory and History.” Radical Philosophy Review, vol. 23, no. 1 (2020): 5-33.
DISSERTATION
Developmental Hegemony and Geopolitical Enlightenment in Louis XIV's France
RESEARCH INTERESTS
Twentieth-century East Central Europe; gender and sexuality; history of the family; Jewish nationalisms; modern Yiddish literature
DISSERTATION
Making a Living and Making a Life: Polish Jewry in Interwar Poland
RESEARCH INTERESTS
Muslim and Christian Iberia, medieval race, geography, climatology, astrology, ajā'ib and marvel
DISSERTATION
The Golden Tree: Race, Climate and Astrology in al-Andalus and Castile