In this talk, I review recent progress made in two areas of thermal field
theory. In particular, I discuss various approaches for the calculation of the
quark gluon plasma thermodynamical properties, and the problem of its photon
production rate.Comment: 10 pages Latex document, 15 postscript figures. Invited talk given at
the 6th Workshop on High Energy Particle Physics, Chennai, India, 3-15 Jan
200