#  Julia Mead 

Postdoctoral Fellow

 

 

 



   ![Julia Mead](/sites/g/files/omnuum4936/files/styles/hwp_4_5__480x600/public/2025-08/Mead_Headshot_2025.jpg?h=a73f94f9&itok=kTAa1nHI) 

 



 





 

Julia Mead is an environmental historian of modern Eastern Europe, with a particular focus on energy, gender, and labor. She received her PhD in history from the University of Chicago in June 2025. Her dissertation, “Lights Out: Mining Masculinity and Energy Crisis in Czechoslovakia, 1948-1992,” traces the rise and fall of the Czechoslovak coal economy from 1948 to 2004 and its relationship to changing norms of masculinity. She also has research interests in the history of household appliances, socialist women’s organizations, and energy infrastructure in the former Eastern Bloc. An article from her dissertation project, "The 1970s Energy Crises and the Threat to Czechoslovak Consumer Socialism," was recently published in the *Journal of Contemporary History*, and her research has been supported by Fulbright, the Central European History Society, and the Czechoslovak Studies Association. Before becoming a historian, Mead worked as a fact checker for *The Nation* and *New York* Magazine.



 

 

 





 

 

- ## Fellowship
    
     [Postdoctoral](/fellowship/postdoctoral)
- ## Fellowship Year
    
     [2025 - 2026](/fellowship-year/2025-2026)
- ## Role
    
     [Fellows](/role/fellow)