Ph.D., Arizona State University

Sabrina Thomas is an Associate Professor of African American History and War and Society at Texas Tech. Her research takes a transnational approach to the intersections of race, nation, and war and examines questions of kinship, identity, and diaspora through the legacies of transracial children born from international conflict. Her first book, Scars of War: The Politics of Paternity and Responsibility for the Amerasians of Vietnam, (University of Nebraska Press, 2021) considered the issue of U.S. citizenship for the Amerasian children of Vietnam. Scars of War was awarded the 2021 “Best First Book” prize from Phi Alpha Theta History Honor Society and was nominated for the Bancroft Prize. In addition to her book, Dr. Thomas is the author of “Blood Politics: Reproducing the Children of ‘Others' in the 1982 Amerasian Immigration Act” published in the Journal of American-East Asian Relations (2019), and “Scholarship During the Coronavirus Pandemic” published in the Journal of Diplomatic History (2021). She has contributed an article “When War Creates Life: Race, Nation, and Belonging for Children Born from War,” to the Cambridge History of War and Society in America (2024).

Dr. Thomas has presented her research at the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, the Association of Asian American Studies, the Society for the History of Childhood and Youth, the Society of Military Historians, the Oral History Association, and the American History Association. In 2022 Dr. Thomas was selected for the Women in the World Institute by the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations and named the Strickland Scholar Series Keynote speaker by Middle Tennessee State University. She has also been recognized for her work on the Amerasians of the Vietnam War. In 2018, Dr. Thomas was selected to attend the Vietnam War/American War Stories Symposium at the University of Indiana, and in 2022 she was a keynote speaker at the annual Vietnam War Conference of the Sam Johnson Vietnam War Archive at Texas Tech University.

Prior to coming to Texas Tech, Dr. Thomas was an Associate Professor and the David A. Moore Chair of American History at Wabash College. She earned a B.A. in History from Colorado State University, M.S. in Counseling from Butler University, and Ph.D. in History from Arizona State University. She is currently working on her second book, The Soul of Blood and Borders: Brown Babies, Black Amerasians, and the African American Response. Her recent interview on the podcast, Military Historians are People Too, is now available on Apple podcasts.