Jordan Thomas is a doctoral candidate in anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a Fellow in the STS Program at Harvard Kennedy School. His research examines how people experience, conceptualize, and navigate climate change, as well as the social, political, and economic structures that shape climate impacts and distribute their consequences unevenly.

He has an embedded interest in the literary methods that enable social theory to be translated into character-driven narratives. His previous book, When It All Burns: Fighting Fire in a Transformed World, a 2025 National Book Award finalist, examined climate change through the prism of wildfires from the vantage of the people who fight them. His current project examines the creation and transformation of capitalism by tracing the story of America’s railroads through the lives of a contemporary community of outlaws who illicitly inhabit them.