Deborah A. Thomas named R. Jean Brownlee Professor of Anthropology

Deborah A. Thomas has been awarded the R. Jean Brownlee Term Chair, which acknowledges her distinguished scholarship and outstanding service to the Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies Program, the Department of Anthropology, and the School of Arts and Sciences. Alongside these appointments, Dr. Thomas is a member of the Steering Committee for the Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies Program and Alice Paul Center. Thomas' research interests include nationalism and alternative sovereignties, globalization, race and gender, labor migration, transnationalism and diaspora, cultural politics, performance, violence and the transformation of space, culture and political economy, popular culture and the Caribbean. Recent publications include Modern Blackness: Nationalism, Globalization, and the Politics of Culture in Jamaica; Globalization and Race: Transformations in the Cultural Production of Blackness; Blackness Across Borders; The Violence of Diaspora; and Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in the Transnational Jamaica. Dr. Thomas’ scholarship, both inside and outside of the classroom, has centered on the intersections of race and gender as key conceptual and grounded frameworks through which to understand the world. 

The R. Jean Brownlee Endowed Term Professorship honors the memory of Dr. R Jean Brownlee whose long service to the Philadelphia community included serving as a Trustee of the McLean Contributorship, "directress" (as the term then went) of Sergeant Hall, Penn’s undergraduate women's residence on 34th Street, Dean of the College of Women, and chief local administrator for the Civil Service Commission - the highest post held by a woman in the entire city at that point. She also taught at all levels in Philadelphia, from kindergarten to high school, and at the college level at Temple. Brownlee earned her doctorate from Penn in political science in 1942. Among Dr. Brownlee's many awards were the 1963 Alumna Award of Merit from Penn, the 1972 Distinguished Alumna Award of Friends' Select, the Governor's designation as Distinguished Daughter of Pennsylvania in the bicentennial year of 1976, and the honorary doctorate of laws here in 1986.