Thomas R. Bull is a doctoral student in History at the University of Pennsylvania. He studies nineteenth-century Romantic nationalism and the ways in which it intersected with processes of imperialism, state-building, and self-determination. To date, Thomas' primary focus has been Greece as the crossroads of the British, French, Russian, and Ottoman Empires and the shifting balance of power in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that is articulated as the "Eastern Question". In future, he aims to further elucidate nineteenth- and twentieth-century Jewish nationalism, philosemitism, and Christian Zionism as they pertain to the Romantic movement across Europe.
Thomas came to Penn from Athens, Greece, where he held a research assistantship in the Library and Archive of the British School at Athens. He holds a Master’s degree from the University of Oxford and a first-class Bachelor’s degree from the University of Bristol, where he received the Arnaldo Momigliano Prize for the best undergraduate performance in Ancient History. Outside of history, Thomas has interests in matters of government, especially foreign policy. To that end, he engages with the Eastern Mediterranean as a region of continued strategic importance in the present day.
Supervisors: Prof. Warren Breckman.
M.St., Classical Archaeology, University of Oxford
B.A., Ancient History, University of Bristol
Intellectual History; Transnational History; Transtemporality; Jewish History; Modern Greece; History of Empire.
Teaching Assistant, Fall 2024: Jews in the Modern World, Prof. Beth Wenger.
Bull, Thomas R. (2024) ‘History from the Margins: George Finlay, George Bancroft, and the Genesis of National History in the Nineteenth Century’, The Annual of the British School at Athens, Vol. 119.
Bull, Thomas R. (in progress) ‘The Athens of America: Philanthropy, Philhellenism, and the “Greek Cause” in Philadelphia 1798–1835’, in Michalis Sotiropoulos (ed.) Philhellenism and the Greek Revolution of 1821: Towards a Global History (London).
The British School at Athens