Lynn M. Thomas

About

Lynn M. Thomas is a Professor and the Giovanni and Amne Costigan Endowed Professor in History at the University of Washington. She serves as the Director of the Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities. Her research focuses on areas within history, and she is involved in academic leadership within the department. Further details about her specific research interests, background, and key contributions are not provided on the page.

Research topics

• Gender studies
• Sociology
• Political science
• Medicine
• History

Selected publications

• Historicising Agency

  Gender & History · 2016-07-12 · 69 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Why has ‘agency’ been such a tenacious concept in historical scholarship on women and gender, and what have been the consequences on this tenacity? This essay tackles these questions and proposes, through a brief examination of the history of skin lighteners in South Africa and beyond, how agency might be pushed in more surprising, more analytically productive directions. Too often agency slips from being a conceptual tool or starting point to a concluding argument. For example, in my subfield o…

  PublisherDOI

• Introduction: Critical perspectives on US global health partnerships in Africa and beyond

  Medicine Anthropology Theory · 2018-05-15 · 26 citations

  articleOpen access
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• Consumer culture and ‘black is beautiful’ in apartheid South Africa and early postcolonial Kenya

  African Studies · 2018-11-26 · 7 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Engaging the ‘method of connective comparison’, this article examines linkages between consumer culture and political debates in apartheid South Africa and early postcolonial Kenya. It does so by considering the history of skin lighteners, commodities that were both common and controversial. Largely unnoticed by commentators at the time, the growth of a black consumer market for skin lighteners in Kenya was tied to the earlier emergence of such a market in South Africa. This history also reveals…

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• Beneath the Surface

  2020-01-01 · 6 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Beneath the Surface: A Transnational History of Skin Lighteners

  2020-01-10 · 4 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  For more than a century, skin lighteners have been a ubiquitous feature of global popular culture-embraced by consumers even as they were fiercely opposed by medical professionals, consumer health advocates, and antiracist thinkers and activists. In Beneath the Surface, Lynn M. Thomas constructs a transnational history of skin lighteners in South Africa and beyond. Analyzing a wide range of archival, popular culture, and oral history sources, Thomas traces the changing meanings of skin color fro…

  DOI

Frequent coauthors

• Bernard Foëx

  University of Edinburgh

  4 shared

• James Dodd

  MRC Epidemiology Unit

  4 shared

• Robert Parker

  University of Cape Town

  4 shared

• Uta G. Poiger

  3 shared

• Tani E. Barlow

  Rice University

  3 shared

• Gavin D. Perkins

  3 shared

• Priti Ramamurthy

  National Geophysical Research Institute

  3 shared

• Alys Eve Weinbaum

  University of Washington

  3 shared

Labs

• Lynn M. Thomas LabPI

Awards & honors

• Watson Foundation
• Social Science Research Council
• U.S. Department of Education (Fulbright)
• Woodrow Wilson Foundation
• National Endowment for the Humanities

Similar researchers at University of Washington

• Richard Johnsonh-176
• Yifan Zhengh-51
• Arther Ferrillh-13