Deborah A. Thomas is the R. Jean Brownlee Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Experimental Ethnography at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation (2019), Exceptional Violence (2011), and Modern Blackness (2004), all from Duke University Press. Thomas codirected the documentary films Four Days in May (2018) and Bad Friday (2011) and is the editor of American Anthropologist. Prior to her life in the academy, she was a professional dancer with the New York–based Urban Bush Women.
Deborah A. Thomas
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Writing on Public Books
Fathers of Empire
There is a moment early on in Hazel Carby’s Imperial Intimacies when she writes about the ways her mother Iris—as a Welsh woman—refused Englishness but still embraced Britishness. This is revealed in her mother’s dismay that …
