S2E5 Sabrina Thomas - Wabash College

Today's guest is Dr. Sabrina Thomas, an Associate Professor and the David A. Moore Chair of American History at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana. Before joining the faculty at Wabash College, Sabrina held a dissertation fellowship at Middle Tennessee State University. She received her BA in History at Colorado State University, earned an MS in Counseling at Butler University, and completed her Ph.D. in History at Arizona State University, working under Season 1, Episode 6 guest Kyle Longley!

Sabrina is a specialist in US Foreign Policy with a transnational focus on the intersections of race, gender, nation, and war. She is particularly interested in children born as a result of international conflict. She published her first book, Scars of War: The Politics of Paternity and Responsibility for the Amerasians of Vietnam, with the University of Nebraska Press in 2021 and was nominated for the prestigious Bancroft Book Prize from the American Historical Association. Her articles have appeared in Diplomatic History and the Journal of American-East Asian Relations, and she has received significant funding for her research, including a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Sabrina is also approaching the completion of a second monograph titled The Soul of Blood and Borders: Brown Babies, Black Amerasians and the African American Response.

Sabrina is active in a number of professional organizations, including the Association for Asian American Studies, the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, the American Historical Association, the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, and the National Council for Black Studies. She is an active board member of the Tim Lai Foundation.

Sabrina bounced around a bit before finally deciding to pursue history as a career - she played volleyball at Colorada State University and coached at the collegiate level and also worked as an academic-athletic advisor at several schools before returning to Arizona State to pursue advanced study in history. She's got a remarkable story - she's a horse AND dog person, has an opinion on image licensing in collegiate athletics, loves BBQ, and has good things to say about teaching at an all-male college. She's also an amazing historian exploring one of the more underexplored consequences of American wars. So join us for a fun chat with Sabrina Thomas!

Rec.: 05/17/2022