Deborah Thomas
Deborah 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: Sovereignty, Witnessing, Repair, 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 and Modern Blackness, and the co-editor of the volumes Sovereignty Unhinged, Citizenship on the Edge, Changing Continuities and the Scholar-Activist Anthropology of Constance R. Sutton, and Globalization and Race.
Thomas co-directed 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. She is the recipient of several awards, including a Guggenheim fellowship, and she is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Prior to her life in the academy, she was a professional dancer with the New York-based Urban Bush Women.
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