RESEARCH INTERESTS

Twentieth-century East Central Europe; state socialism and post-socialism; Cold War history; labor, gender, and sexuality; Anthropocene, energy, and environmental history; mining

DISSERTATION

Socialist Rust Belt: Energy, Masculinity, and the End of Czechoslovak Socialism

BIOGRAPHY

Julia Mead is an environmental historian of modern Eastern Europe, with a particular focus on energy, gender, and labor. Her dissertation, “Socialist Rust Belt: Energy, Masculinity, and the End of Czechoslovak Socialism,” traces the rise and fall of the Czechoslovak coal economy from 1948 to 2004, and its relationship to changing norms of masculinity. She shows how coal miners in socialist Czechoslovakia achieved an elite social status, and how they lost it almost overnight during the transition to capitalism. She also has research interests in the history of household appliances, socialist women’s organizations, and energy infrastructure in the former Eastern Bloc. Before becoming a historian, Mead worked as a fact checker for The Nation and New York Magazine.

PUBLICATIONS

"The Kingdom of Antique Televisions: Reparability and the Afterlives of Socialist Electronics," Gender and Materiality in Central and Easter Europe in the 20th Century 9 (2023).

“What Has Socialism Ever Done for Women? Reflections on Women’s Emancipation in the Eastern Bloc,” with Kristen Ghodsee, Catalyst vol. 2 no. 1 (Summer 2018)

“Debating Gender in State Socialist Women’s Magazines: The Cases of Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia,” with Kristen Ghodsee, History of Communism in Europe vol. 8 (2017)