Deborah Thomas: Editor-in-Chief, American Anthropologist
Deborah Thomas, a professor of anthropology and Africana studies in the University of Pennsylvania School of Arts & Sciences, has been named editor-in-chief of the American Anthropological Association’s (AAA) flagship journal, American Anthropologist, effective July 1. The position will run through June 30, 2020.
Dr. Thomas also holds appointments in Penn’s Graduate School of Education and School of Social Policy & Practice. She is a core faculty member of the Alice Paul Center for Research on Women, Gender and Sexuality.
Her vision for the quarterly journal, which reaches the nearly 10,000 AAA members and tens of thousands of researchers, also includes the development of an online presence that will cultivate broad awareness of the work done by the association’s scholars. This spans the main fields of anthropology: cultural anthropology, biological/physical anthropology, archaeology and linguistic anthropology.
Dr. Thomas has served as a member of the American Anthropologist editorial board and as co-editor of one of its sections, “Visual Anthropology.” From 2007 until 2010, she edited the AAA’s journal, Transforming Anthropology.