Thomas J. Adams

Thomas J. Adams is Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies and History at the University of South Alabama. Before arriving at South Alabama in 2023, he was a faculty member in History and U.S. Studies at the University of Sydney for eight years and where he remains an Honorary Associate. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow and ACLS New Faculty Fellow at Tulane University, and has also held fellowships from re:work (IGK-Work and Human Lifecycle in Global History, Humboldt University Berlin) and the Camargo Foundation.

His research focuses broadly on the history of United States political economy, labor, cities, and political culture. He is especially interested in the contingent sources of a variety of inequalities and material insecurities in American social life. His work has also been devoted to the history and present of New Orleans and the Gulf South and includes the collections Remaking New Orleans: Beyond Exceptionalism and Authenticity (Duke University Press, 2019) and Working in the Big Easy: The History and Politics of Labor in New Orleans (University of Louisiana Press, 2014).

While at the Warren Center he will be completing a long-suffering manuscript entitled The Ideology of Inequality: Political Economy and the Problem of ‘Service’ Work in the United States. The book traces a centuries-long history of the server/servant as distinct category of laborer and ‘service’ as a discrete form of labor and economic good. It then follows how this history formed the unacknowledged backdrop to political and cultural responses to the rise of and transition to a so-called service economy in United States from the end of World War II through the contemporary era.