Julia Mead studies masculinity, coal mining, and the energy regime of state socialism.
She is a PhD candidate in history at the University of Chicago.
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.