James Merle Thomas

James Merle Thomas is a Philadelphia-based art historian and curator. He is currently a professor of Art History at the Tyler School of Art at Temple University, where he lectures on a number of topics, including global contemporary art, exhibition and museum studies, and critical theory.

Thomas holds a doctorate in Art History from Stanford University, and between 2003 and 2013, worked with critic and curator Okwui Enwezor to produce a series of large-scale biennials and exhibitions of contemporary art, including the Second International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Seville (2006) and The Seventh Gwangju Biennale (2008).

He is Executive Editor of several anthologies dedicated to questions of art, ethnography, and media theory, including Intense Proximity: An Anthology of the Near and the Far (2012) and Picture Industry: A Provisional History of the Technical Image (2018).