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).
Attend
UPCOMING LECTURES & CONFERENCES
I’ll visit UCR to talk about work in progress.
A book launch event for the New Nanzan Guide to Japanese Religions held in conjunction with the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion. Join the co-editors, collaborating editors, and authors for food and drink to celebrate the new book.
I’ll be speaking on a roundtable organized by the North American Association for the Study of Religion.
This roundtable discussion re-examines religion in the mid-twentieth century United States. Histories of this time period have traditionally emphasized a religious boom post-World War II, Cold War anxieties, suburbanization, and “tri-faith” consensus. Our conversation will begin the process of destabilizing these familiar historiographies.
This roundtable assembles scholars of religion to discuss Leslie Ribovich’s Without a Prayer: Religion and Race in New York City Public Schools.
I'll be visiting Lewis & Clark College to talk about work in progress.
Read
BOOKS
RECENT ARTICLES
Why Religious Studies? Religious Studies Review 50, no. 2 (2024).