Deborah Thomas

Deborah A. Thomas is the R. Jean Brownlee Professor of Anthropology, and the Director of the Center for Experimental Ethnography at the University of Pennsylvania. Her recent book, Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation, was awarded the Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Book Award from the Caribbean Studies Association in 2021, and the Senior Book Prize from the American Ethnological Society in 2020. She is also the author of Exceptional Violence (2011), and Modern Blackness (2004). She is co-editor of the volumes Sovereignty Unhinged (2023), Citizenship on the Edge (2022); Changing Continuities and the Scholar-Activist Anthropology of Constance R. Sutton (2022); and Globalization and Race (2006). Thomas co-directed and co-produced the documentary films Bad Friday and Four Days in May, and she is the co-curator of a multi-media installation titled “Bearing Witness: Four Days in West Kingston.” From 2016-2020, Thomas was the Editor-in-Chief of American Anthropologist, the flagship journal of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), and she is currently the co-chair of the AAA Commission on the Ethical Treatment of Human Remains. Prior to Thomas’s life as an academic, she was a professional dancer with the Urban Bush Women.