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. Thomas also directed and produced the documentary films Bad Friday: Rastafari after Coral Gardens and Four Days in May, and the experimental short film Four Days in West Kingston. She is the co-curator of a multimedia installation, Bearing Witness: Four Days in West Kingston, which opened at the Penn Museum in November 2017. Thomas is also the editor-in-chief of American Anthropologist, the flagship journal of the American Anthropological Association.