Deborah Thomas
University of Pennsylvania · English
Active 1976–2025
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About
Deborah Thomas is the Jean Brownlee Professor of Anthropology and the Director of the Center for Experimental Ethnography at the University of Pennsylvania. Her academic role is within the Department of Anthropology, where she contributes to the university's scholarly community. Her position as a professor indicates her involvement in teaching, research, and leadership within her field, with a focus on ethnography and anthropology.
Research topics
- Sociology
- History
- Political science
- Gender studies
- Anthropology
Selected publications
American Anthropologist · 2020-03-01 · 21 citations
articleOpen access1st authorCorrespondingIn July 2019, I attended a lecture titled “Independence is a Right, Not a Gift,” by Justice Patrick Robinson, a member of the International Court of Justice in The Hague. Prior to his appointment to the court, Justice Robinson was Jamaica's representative to the Sixth Committee of the United Nations General Assembly and was chairman of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. He also served as a member of the Haiti Truth and Justice Commission from 1995 to 1996, as a judge for the Internat…
Annual Review of Anthropology · 2024-07-15 · 20 citations
articleOpen access1st authorCorrespondingThis article focuses on the concept of refusal, particularly as it has been developed within critical Black studies and critical Indigenous studies within anthropology and beyond. It argues that while both Foucauldian and Gramscian frames have generated often exquisite analyses of the animations and counter-animations of power, they have not, in a general sense, sufficiently attended to the foundational processes that charted the possibilities of modern personhood and political life not only in…
Multimodality & Society · 2021-09-01 · 8 citations
articleSenior authorCorrespondingThe recent renewal of attention to abstraction within Black literary and visual studies, it seems to us, has to do with an interest in the various ways abstraction rejects ascribed categories, eschews narrow assumptions about “relevance,” and embraces experimentation during a moment when it is arguably most needed. Abstraction moves us simultaneously outside of representative realism, and it embraces research practices that often require the kind of intimacies that have long been the bread and b…
An Anthropology of Epochal Shift; or, What Leith Mullings Teaches Us about Global Transformation
Transforming Anthropology · 2021-10-01 · 5 citations
article1st authorCorrespondingThis article draws from Leith Mullings’s insights about the changing dimensions of racism, a “relationship of accumulation through dispossession” (2020, 250), to think through contemporary realignments of global capitalism spawned by the intensification of Chinese investment overseas. I frame my analysis within the concept of epochal shift in order to draw attention not only to the novel dimensions of power within a changed global political economy, but also to the ways these novel arrangements…
Afterlives: The Recursive Plantation
Cambridge imperial and post-colonial studies series · 2023-01-01 · 3 citations
book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
Frequent coauthors
- 11 shared
John L. Jackson
Naturalis Biodiversity Center
- 9 shared
Maher Albitar
- 8 shared
Doménico Ribatti
University of Bari Aldo Moro
- 8 shared
Hagop M. Kantarjian
The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center
- 8 shared
Angelo Vacca
- 8 shared
Rosario Giustolisi
IT University of Copenhagen
- 8 shared
Franco Dammacco
- 8 shared
Francesco Di Raimondo
University of Catania
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