Mary E. Thomas is a Professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Director of the Ohio Prison Education Exchange Project. 

Trained as a feminist geographer, her work examines how youth in the US come to understand themselves and their identities in and through institutional spaces like schools and detention facilities. Her research shows that while youth must spend vast amounts of time negotiating institutional structures that demand behavioral conformity, they alone shoulder the repercussions when they fail to meet expectations that are grounded in stereotypes, norms, and demands for idealized bodies. Her research foregrounds the emotional and subjective experiences of youth, especially girls, gender nonconforming, and queer youth, as they confront the oppressive social and cultural expectations of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, and embodiment.

Dr. Thomas teaches courses on the school to prison pipeline, feminist pedagogy, feminist prison studies, and settler colonialism. She has taught courses on feminist and queer perspectives on incarceration  and feminist studies at the Ohio Reformatory for Women. In collaboration with Dr. Tiyi Morris at OPEEP, she is working to expand OSU’s commitment to prison-based education. Her goal as an educator is to foster opportunities that enable personal and intellectual growth to flourish simultaneously and to elevate collaborative practices of teaching and learning. Dr. Morris and Dr. Thomas are currently researching the history of race relations in Ohio's prisons for women since 1950.

Please visit OPEEP: Ohio Prison Education Exchange Project. 

We are building prison-to-college pathways through innovative teaching and collaborative inside-out learning in prison settings.

Book Publications

• Settling the Boom: The Sites and Subjects of Bakken Oil (co-edited with Bruce Braun, 2022)
• Urban Geography: A Critical Introduction (With Andrew Jonas and Eugene McCann. Wiley Press, 2015)
• Multicultural Girlhood: Racism, Sexuality, and the Conflicted Spaces of American Education (Temple University Press, 2011)
• A Companion to Social Geography (co-edited with Vincent Del Casino, Paul Cloke and Ruth Panelli. Blackwell Press, 2011)

Recent ARTICLES AND CHAPTERS

2024. Tiyi Morris and Mary Thomas. Countering Carceral Logics with Black Feminist Pedagogies. In Wendy Hesford and Amy Shuman, eds. Human Rights on the Move. Ohio State University Press (book series, On Possibility: Social Change and the Arts+Humanities).

2021. ‘This place saved my life’: the myth of the savior prison and its appeal for incarcerated girls. In Alexandra Cox and Laura Abrams, eds. Palgrave International Handbook of Youth Imprisonment. Palgrave MacMillan.

2019. 'Y'all trying to make a mockery out of me.' The confined sexualities of girls in a US juvenile detention facility. Emotion, Space and Society.