Franke Lectures in the Humanities

Deborah 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 Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in Transnational Jamaica and Modern Blackness: Nationalism, Globalization, and the Politics of Culture in Jamaica, and coeditor of the volume Globalization and Race: Transformations in the Cultural Production of Blackness.  Her new book, Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation, is forthcoming.

Anupama Rao is Associate Professor of History at Barnard College, Senior Editor of Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, and Acting Director of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. She has written widely on colonialism and humanitarianism, and on non-Western histories of gender and sexuality. Her book The Caste Question theorized caste subalternity, with specific focus on the role of anti-caste thought (and its thinkers) in producing alternative genealogies of political subject-formation.