Thomas is a George Kingsley Roth Research Fellow and publishes work on music from an anthropological perspective. He has spent the past decade primarily researching global and cultural reception histories of European baroque music, affect theory, popular culture, ritual and religion, and material anthropology. He received the William H. Sheide Prize in 2024.
As a Japanese MEXT scholar, and a scholar for the Japan Foundation, he worked on an anthropological reception history of J.S. Bach’s music in Japan. This research formed the basis for his PhD thesis at Cornell University. Thomas is currently looking to publish a book, based on his doctoral research, while beginning new research on the concert, religious, and domestic music making activities of the multinational Foreign Settlements of Nagasaki, Kobe, and Yokohama between 1859–1899. This second project will explore music making in these vibrant communities and the historical legacies that they leave.
Select Publications:
“Online Japanese Kogaku: Music’s Rhizomatic Affect,” in James H. Grayson, David Shankland, and Patricia Lysaght (eds.), Creativity during the Covid Lockdown: Life and Renewal During the Pandemic (Sean Kingston Publishing, forthcoming 2024).
“Bach in the Early Shōwa-period Japan (1926–1945): Historiography and Reception,” in Reinhard Strohm (ed.), Transcultural Music History: Global Participation and Regional Diversity in the Modern Age (VWB-Verlag für Wissenschaft und Bildung, 2021), 183–208.