Mary E. Thomas is a Faculty Member of Dept. of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies Affiliate to the Department of Geography

Current Research: I study contemporary girlhood in the United States.  My 2011 book, Multicultural Girlhood, examines racial-ethnic segregation among Latino and Armenian girls at a high school in Los Angeles.  The book contributes a feminist and psychoanalytic viewpoint on the conservative racial and sexual practices of American girlhood in scholarship that has been more likely to emphasize girls’ heroic agency.   My current research explores girls’ peer relationships in an Ohio juvenile detention facility. 

In my work, I am interested in bringing a geographic lens to the lives of young women, and I have written about urban, home, and school spaces – and now, prison spaces – to do so.

Book Publications:

• Geoaesthetics of the Play: Unsettling Sites and Subjects of the Bakken Oil Boom (co-edited with Bruce Braun and Mathew Coleman. University of the Minnesota Press, 2019 tentative)
   
• Multicultural Girlhood: Racism, Sexuality, and the Conflicted Spaces of American Education (Temple University Press, 2011)
• A Companion to Social Geography (co-edited with Vincent Del Casino, Paul Cloke and Ruth Panelli. Blackwell Press, 2011)
• Urban Geography: A Critical Introduction (With Andrew Jonas and Eugene McCann. Wiley Press, 2015)

ARTICLES AND CHAPTERS

2017. Kathryn Yusoff and Mary Thomas. The Anthropocene. In Undine Sellbach, Lynn Turner and Ron Broglio, eds. Edinburgh Companion to Animal Studies. Edinburgh University Press.

2017. Mary Thomas and Kathryn Yusoff. Geology. In Stacy Alaimo, ed. Macmillian Interdisciplinary Handbooks, Gender: Matter.  Macmillan.

2014.  When 1+1 does not equal 2: childhood sexuality and Laplanche’s enigmatic signifier. In Paul Kingsbury and Steve Pile, eds. Psychoanalysis and Geography.  Ashgate Press, pp 199-212.

2014. Adriane Brown and Mary Thomas. “i just like knowing they can look at it and relize who i really am”: Recognition and the limits of girlhood agency on MySpace.  Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 39.4: 949-972.

2013. Feminist theory. In Rich Shein, et al., eds. The Companion to Cultural Geography.  Blackwell Press.

Teaching Interests

• Girls studies
• Geographies of race, gender, sexuality and age
• Identity and social difference
• Prison studies and US carceral society
• Research methodology