School of Arts & Sciences Names Two GSWS Core Faculty to Endowed Chairs

Please join us in congratulating Ayako Kano and Deb Thomas on this accomplishment!

Please read the following from the Almanac article below:

Ayako Kano: R. Jean Brownlee Endowed Term Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations

Ayako Kano has been named the R. Jean Brownlee Endowed Term Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations. Dr. Kano’s scholarship focuses on the intersection of gender, performance, politics, and Japanese cultural history from the early modern era to the present. Her major works include Acting Like a Woman in Modern Japan: Theater, Gender, and Nationalism, which examines the first generation of actresses in modern Japan, and Japanese Feminist Debates: A Century of Contention on Sex, Love, and Labor, which analyzes debates among feminists in the context of Japanese intellectual history. She has also co-edited Rethinking Japanese Feminisms, a collection that showcases Japanese feminist ideas and actions as diverse, contentious, and evolving. 

Dr. Kano earned an undergraduate degree in British literature from Keio University, Japan. Her MA and PhD degrees are in comparative literature from Cornell University. At Penn, she teaches modern Japanese fiction, film, and critical theory, Japanese theater, and courses on gender and sexuality in Japan and East Asia. 

Dr. Kano has been at Penn since 1995, and has been a core faculty member in gender, sexuality, and women’s studies, as well as a member of the graduate groups in history, comparative literature, the history of art, and cinema & media studies. She is also an affiliated faculty member in theater arts and in Asian American studies. Since 2025, she has served as director of Penn’s Wolf Humanities Center, having previously directed the Wolf Undergraduate Humanities Forum. 

The R. Jean Brownlee Endowed Term Chair was established by the McLean Contributionship under the direction of the late William L. McLean, III, and his wife. They established this chair in recognition of Dr. Brownlee’s years of service to the contributionship and to Penn and to honor their lifelong friendship with Dr. Brownlee. R. Jean Brownlee earned her doctorate from Penn in political science in 1942 and returned in 1947 as an assistant professor of political science. She served as Dean of the College for Women from 1958 to 1975. In 1986, she received Penn’s honorary Doctor of Laws in recognition of her achievements.

Deborah A. Thomas: Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought

Deborah A. Thomas, chair of the department of anthropology, has been named the Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought. She also directs the Center for Experimental Ethnography and is the author of Exorbitance: A Speculative Ethnography of Inheritance, Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation, Exceptional Violence, and Modern Blackness. Dr. Thomas is also the co-director of the documentary films Bad Friday and Four Days in May and the writer and visual editor of the audio-visual prose-poem, “Tidalectic Repair,” which was exhibited at Wrightwood 659 Chicago from April to July 2026 and selected for the Kingston Biennial in Jamaica.

From 2016 to 2020, Dr. Thomas was editor-in-chief of American Anthropologist, the flagship journal of the American Anthropological Association (AAA). She also co-chaired the AAA Commission for the Ethical Treatment of Human Remains. She has received several awards, including a Guggenheim fellowship, and she is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Before her life in the academy, she was a professional dancer with the New York–based Urban Bush Women.

The late Bernard G. Segal, C’28, L’31, HON’69, and Geraldine R. Segal, ED’30, GR’78, established the Geraldine R. Segal Professorship in American Social Thought in 1978. The late Geraldine R. Segal completed her PhD in sociology at Penn and was the author of In Any Fight Some Fall and Blacks in the Law. Bernard Segal, a former Penn Trustee, was one of America’s most respected lawyers and received Penn’s Alumni Award of Merit in 1977. The professorship is interdisciplinary and is awarded to a scholar of national reputation whose central interests include human rights, civil liberties, and race relations.