About

Julia T. Thomas is a  Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Sociology and a predoctoral affiliate of the Center for Demography and Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  She will be joining the Department of Sociology at the University of Georgia as an Assistant Professor in Fall 2025.

Her work focuses on the influence of racial inequality, current and historical, on patterns of crime and the criminal justice system in the U.S. and informs how the criminal justice system is used as social control to maintain racial hierarchy.  Her dissertation research leverages novel data and econometric modeling techniques to investigate the legacy of racial violence on American capital punishment.  

Julia's work has been published in the American Sociological Review and Social Science Research and has been supported by multiple fellowships, including the National Science Foundation's Graduate Research Fellowship.  Her scholarship has also received the American Sociological Association's Distinguished Student Paper Award in the area of Crime, Law, and Deviance as well as an honorable mention for the Genevieve Gorst Herfurth Award for Outstanding Research in the Social Sciences.

Julia received her B.A. from Harvard University and her M.S. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  She expects to receive her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2025.