Politics Faculty

Research Interests

Professor Thomas is interested in political thinking, history, and Southeast Asia, especially the Philippines. She is interested in trying to recover historical political thinking that falls outside of what is often thought to constitute political theory.  Sometimes that means considering the actions of those who didn’t write, to try to imagine how they may have imagined their world and possibilities within it; sometimes that means reading works that aren’t overtly about political life to see what political visions they conjure; sometimes it means reading works written by people who aren’t well known in political theory.  She is also interested in much that is more easily recognizable as political theory, and often teaches it.

Her current research is on the struggles over sovereignty in the Philippines during the late eighteenth-century, when the British occupied Spanish colonial Manila as part of what was later called the Seven Years War.  The occupation and events surrounding it reveals how sovereignty was composed—and also compromised—by complex webs of alliances and allegiances.

Her earlier book, Orientalists, Propagandists, and Ilustrados: Filipino Scholarship and the End of Spanish Colonialism argues that Filipino intellectuals of the late nineteenth century used Orientalist genres, methods and conventions for anti-colonial ends.  Through this project, she also developed general comparative interests in nineteenth-century Orientalist and ethnological scholarship and the political uses of such knowledge, especially among emerging nationalists movements around the globe at the time. 

She has also written about late nineteenth-century newspapers in Manila; the politics of orthography; the shared qualities of nineteenth-century European Orientalist thought and contemporary comparative political theory; and nineteenth-century Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin’s conceptions of enlightenment, secrecy, and education.  Along with Leigh Jenco (LSE) and Murad Idris (Michigan) she edited the Oxford Handbook of Comparative Political Theory (2020).

Biography, Education and Training

Ph.D. (2002) Cornell University, Department of Government. Major: Political Theory. Minor: Colonialism and Nationalism.

M.Sc. (1994) London School of Economics and Political Science, Department of Government. Major: Political Theory.

B.A. (summa cum laude, 1992) Oberlin College. Major: English Literature. Minors: Philosophy, Women’s Studies.

Selected Publications

Books:

• Orientalists, Propagandists, and Ilustrados: Filipino Scholarship and the End of Spanish Colonialism (University of Minnesota Press, 2012; Anvil Publishing edition with introduction by Caroline Hau, 2016).
• editor, with Leigh Jenco and Murad Idris, Oxford Handbook of Comparative Political Theory (2020).

Articles and Book Chapters:

• “Securing Trade: The Military Labor of the British Occupation of Manila, 1762-1764.” The International Review of Social History 64, Special Issue 27: Free and Unfree Labor in Port Cities, eds. Pepijn Brandon, Pernille Roege, Niklas Frykman (2019).
• “Proclaiming Sovereignty: Some Reflections from the Eighteenth-Century Philippines.”  In Comparative Political Theory in Time and Place. Daniel Kapust and Helen Kinsella, eds. (Palgrave MacMillan, 2017).
• “Troubling Appropriations: Pedro Paterno's Filipino Deployment of French Lamarckianism.” In Colonial Exchanges. Burke Hendrix and Deborah Baumgold, eds. (Manchester University Press, 2017).
• “Secrecy's Use: Using Bakunin to Theorize Authority and Free Action.” Contemporary Political Theory 15, no. 3 (2016).
• “Orientalism and Comparative Political Theory.” The Review of Politics 72, no. 4 (2010).
• “‘K’ is for De-Kolonization: Anti-Colonial Nationalism and Orthographic Reform.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 49, no. 4 (2007).
• “Isabelo de los Reyes and the Philippine Contemporaries of La Solidaridad.” Philippine Studies 54, no. 3 (2006).

Teaching Interests

Professor Thomas teaches courses in 19th and 20th century political theory, Orientalism, comparative colonialism and anti-colonialism, historical revolutionary movements, socialism, and anarchism.