Deborah A. 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 book, Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation: Sovereignty, Witnessing, Repair, was awarded the Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Book Award from the Caribbean Studies Association in 2021, the Senior Book Prize from the American Ethnological Society in 2020, and was also the runner-up for the Gregory Bateson Prize in the same year. She is also the author of Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in Transnational Jamaica (2011), and Modern Blackness: Nationalism, Globalization, and The Politics of Culture in Jamaica (2004). 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 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, which was on view at the Penn Museum from November 2017 to October 2020. She is the recipient of several awards, including a Guggenheim fellowship. 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 New York-based Urban Bush Women.