Born in Suffolk, England, Thomas holds an MSc in International and Asian History from LSE and a BA in History from the University of Bath Spa. He has studied Russian in Moscow, St Petersburg, and Yasnaya Polyana, as well as Japanese in Fukuoka and Italian in Florence. An enthusiastic teacher and lover of cats, Thomas has also been studying Mandarin Chinese in London since July 2021. 

Thomas' research explores how the survivors of the Moscow-based Comintern institutional network help explain the anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist momentum of the inter-war period. Using archives in Moscow and around the world, Thomas aims to fill a number of research gaps in the biographies of influential revolutionaries, as well as in our understanding of their intellectual formation. Interpreting Moscow as the nexus of a global revolutionary propaganda network that brought together an unprecedented number of anti-imperialists, Thomas hopes to reveal how the students' transformative and traumatic experiences in Moscow were to be engraved on the borders of the Cold War world. 

Provisional  'Survivors of Moscow Educational Institutions and the Comintern Revolutionary Network (1918-1938)'.

Supervisor: Professor Vladislav Zubok (Head of the Cold War Studies programme)

Research Cluster: Contemporary International History and the Global Cold War