Environmental Humanities Seminar with Julia Mead
Date and Time
A Right to Light: The Moral Economy of Electricity in Prague’s 1967 Strahov Demonstration
Speaker: Julia Mead, 2025-26 MHC Postdoctoral Fellow
Respondent: Alison Frank Johnson
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.
Alison Frank Johnson is Professor of History and Chair of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. Her teaching and research focuses on the history of German-speaking Europe and the Habsburg Monarchy. Additional research interests include environmental history, capital punishment, the Alps, and the Mediterranean slave trade.