Deborah A. Thomas

Deborah A. Thomas is Chair and the R. Jean Brownlee Professor of Anthropology, and the Director of the Center for Experimental Ethnography at the University of Pennsylvania.  She is also core faculty in Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, holds secondary appointments with the Graduate School of Education and the Department of Africana Studies, and is a member of the graduate groups in English, Comparative Literature, and the School of Social Policy and Practice.  She is also a Research Associate with the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Johannesburg.  Prior to her appointment at Penn, she spent two years as a Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Center for the Americas at Wesleyan University, and four years teaching in the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University. 

Thomas’s new book, Exorbitance:  A Speculative Ethnography of Inheritance, was recently released by Duke University Press.  She is also the author of Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation:  Sovereignty, Witnessing, Repair (which 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); Exceptional Violence:  Embodied Citizenship in Transnational Jamaica (2011), and Modern Blackness:  Nationalism, Globalization, and The Politics of Culture in Jamaica (2004).  the R. Jean Brownlee Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania.  She is co-editor of the volumes Sovereignty Unhinged:  An Illustrated Primer for the Study of Present Intensities, Disavowals, and Temporal Derangements (2023), Citizenship on the Edge:  Sex, Gender, Race (2022); Changing Continuities and the Scholar-Activist Anthropology of Constance R. Sutton (2022); and Globalization and Race:  Transformations in the Cultural Production of Blackness (2006).  Thomas co-directed and co-produced two films:  BAD FRIDAY:  RASTAFARI AFTER CORAL GARDENS (with John L. Jackson, Jr. and Junior “Gabu” Wedderburn), a documentary that chronicles the history of violence in Jamaica through the eyes of its most iconic community – Rastafari – and shows how people use their recollections of the Coral Gardens “incident” in 1963 to imagine new possibilities for the future; and FOUR DAYS IN MAY (with Junior “Gabu” Wedderburn and Deanne M. Bell), an experimental documentary that juxtaposes archives related to the “Tivoli Incursion” in May 2010, when Jamaican security forces entered West Kingston to arrest Christopher Coke, wanted for extradition to the United States. At least 75 civilians were killed during this operation.  She also co-curated a multi-media installation titled Bearing Witness:  Four Days in West Kingston, which was on view at the Penn Museum from November 2017 to October 2020.  Thomas has also begun post-production on a new film project, again in collaboration with Junior “Gabu” Wedderburn, about the Ethiopian Zion Coptic Church in Jamaica.  She has published extensively in peer-reviewed journals across the disciplines, and she is the recipient of many awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship.  She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2024.

As a multi-modal ethnographer who has been interested in the afterlives of imperialism, in the forms of community, subjectivity and expectation that are produced by violence, and in how these are expressed and mapped, she is currently working on a project she is calling “Middle Passages and Returns.”  This project brings together long-term scholarly and artistic commitments with pedagogy and community building to create the conditions for complex engagement with the histories (and presents) of empire by thinking relationally about the Caribbean, South Africa, and St. Helena Island.  The project positions empire as palimpsestic and instrumental; it interrogates the cycles of dispossession, world-building, and abandonment to think more complexly about diasporic movement, dispossession, and repair. 

Prior to her life as an academic, Thomas was a professional dancer with the New York-based Urban Bush Women, a company that is committed to using art as a means of addressing issues of social justice and encouraging civic engagement, and that brings the untold stories of disenfranchised people to light through dance from a woman-centered perspective and as members of the African Diaspora community.  Thomas was also a Program Director with the National Council for Research on Women, an international working alliance of women’s research and policy centers whose mission is to enhance the connections among research, policy analysis, advocacy, and innovative programming on behalf of women and girls.  From 2016-2020, she was the Editor-in-Chief of American Anthropologist, the flagship journal of the American Anthropological Association, and she co-edited the journal Transforming Anthropology from 2007-2010.  She was also a member of the Editorial Committee of the Caribbean-based journal Social and Economic Studies, of the Executive Council for the Caribbean Studies Association (2008-2011), and of the board of the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (2012-2017).  She was the Secretary of the Society for Cultural Anthropology from 2010-2014, and she co-chaired the AAA Commission on the Ethical Treatment of Human Remains (2022-2024).