Photo credit: Eric Sucar for the University of Pennsylvania
Pronunciation: Jolyon is a Middle English form of the more common name “Julian.” To pronounce it as I do, just say “Julian” but change the first vowel to an “o.”
Pronouns: he/him/his
Jolyon Baraka Thomas is Associate Professor and Interim Department Chair of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Drawing on Tradition: Manga, Anime, and Religion in Contemporary Japan (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2012) and Faking Liberties: Religious Freedom in American-Occupied Japan (University of Chicago Press, 2019), which 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. In addition to these monographs, Thomas has co-edited the forthcoming New Nanzan Guide to Japanese Religions (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2024) and is coauthoring a “trigraph” tentatively titled Animating Action. 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 has bylines at public-facing venues such as Aeon, Dharma World, Killing the Buddha, Marginalia, Nippon.com, The Revealer, Sacred Matters, and Tricycle. Thomas sits on the editorial advisory boards of American Religion, the Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, the Journal of Global Buddhism, and Nova Religio. He has also served on the steering committee of the Japanese Religions Unit of the American Academy of Religion, the Northeast Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies, the Japan-US Friendship Commission, and the US-Japan Conference on Cultural and Educational Interchange (CULCON).
