Jolyon Baraka Thomas is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, where he teaches courses on religion as it intersects with media, politics, and the law. His research focuses primarily on Japan, the United States, and their respective empires from the nineteenth century to the present.
Thomas’s first book, Drawing on Tradition: Manga, Anime, and Religion in Contemporary Japan, appeared with University of Hawai`i Press in 2012. His 2019 University of Chicago Press monograph, Faking Liberties: Religious Freedom in American-Occupied Japan, received an award for excellence in the study of religion from the American Academy of Religion in 2020. His third book, Difficult Subjects: Religion and the Politics of Public Education in Japan and the United States, is under contract with University of Chicago Press.
Thomas’s academic articles have appeared in journals such as the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, the Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, Material Religion, and Nova Religio. He also has bylines at public-facing venues such as Aeon, Dharma World, Killing the Buddha, Marginalia, Nippon.com, The Revealer, Sacred Matters, and Tricycle.
Thomas performs service work in a number of elected and appointed positions. He is on the editorial advisory boards of American Religion, the Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, the Journal of Global Buddhism, and Nova Religio. In the past he has served as a member of the steering committee of the Japanese Religious Unit and as a member of the Religion and the Arts Award Jury for the American Academy of Religion; he currently serves as an elected member of the Northeast Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies. Thomas is also a member of the Japan-US Friendship Commission (a federal agency that facilitates educational aspects of the bilateral relationship through grant making and other programming) and the binational US-Japan Conference on Cultural and Educational Interchange (CULCON).