Speaker
Prof. Julia Adeney THOMAS
University of Notre Dame, USA
Julia Adeney THOMAS teaches history at the University of Notre Dame (USA) and researches the intellectual history of Japan, photography as a political practice, and the challenge of the Anthropocene to historical practice. She is the author of Reconfiguring Modernity: Concepts of Nature in Japanese Ideology; Strata and Three Human Stories (with Jan Zalasiewicz); and The Anthropocene: A Multidisciplinary Approach (with geologists Mark Williams and Jan Zalasiewicz). Among her edited volumes are Japan at Nature’s Edge (with Ian J.. Miller and Brett Walker) and Altered Earth: Getting the Anthropocene Right. She is currently working on The Historian’s Task in the Anthropocene. Thomas’s many articles bridge the divide between the humanities and the sciences to address our global environmental crisis. Although she lives in Chicago, her heart is in the Appalachian Mountains of Virginia.

This talk explores both what the Anthropocene is and what Japan might teach us as we navigate the coming decades of unprecedented disruption. Some have suggested that early modern Japan exemplified satisfactory stewardship of nature while others argue that even Tokugawa society pushed beyond environmental constraints. Today some hope that Japan’s current urban consolidation and population decline will allow nature to recover and stabilize, but others dispute this contention. In exploring these debates, this talk puts Japan’s history into conversation with Anthropocene science.

Registration Link/ Event Page
No registration required.

Enquires
NAGAOKA Misaki (mnagaoka@cuhk.edu.hk)