Closing Discussion

Deborah A. Thomas is the R. Jean Brownlee Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. She is also core faculty in Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, holds a secondary appointment with the Graduate School of Education, and is a member of the graduate groups in English, Africana Studies, Comparative Literature, and the School of Social Policy and Practice.   

Thomas is the author of ​Modern Blackness:  Nationalism, Globalization and the Politics of Culture in Jamaica (2004), Exceptional Violence:  Embodied Citizenship in Transnational Jamaica (2011), and Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation: Sovereignty, Witnessing, and Repair (2019),  and co-editor of the volume Globalization and Race:  Transformations in the Cultural Production of Blackness(2006). She also co-produced and co-directed the experimental documentary Four Days in May, co-curated the Bearing Witness Exhibit and co-directed the documentary Bad Friday: Rastafari after Coral Gardens. Prior to her life as an academic, she was a professional dancer with the New York-based Urban Bush Women.  

Jenny L. Davis is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation and an Associate Professor of Anthropology and American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign where she is the director of the American Indian Studies Program.

After earning undergraduate degrees from Oklahoma State University, she obtained a MA and PhD in Linguistics University of Colorado, Boulder. Before coming to UIUC, she was a Henry Roe Cloud Fellow in American Indian Studies at Yale University, and a Lyman T. Johnson Postdoctoral Fellow in Linguistics at the University of Kentucky.

She is the 2019-2023 Chancellor’s Fellow of Indigenous Research & Ethics. In this role, she is working to develop campus initiatives, including a campus-wide NAGPRA office, to ensure that the University is knowledgeable about and in compliance with U.S. and tribal government policies and protocols through collaborating with faculty, the NAGPRA Officer, campus and tribal leaders, and advising the Chancellor and Vice Chancellors on issues involving ethical research of Indigenous people, histories, and cultures. She also serves as the co-chair of the campus NAGPRA Advisory Committee. Her research focuses on contemporary Indigenous language revitalization; Indigenous gender and sexuality; and collaborative methods, ethics, and repatriation in Indigenous research. 

Her research has been published in the Annual Review of Anthropology, American Anthropologist, Gender & Language, Language & Communication, and the Review of International American Studies (RIAS), among others.

Monique Scott, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the History of Art Department at Bryn Mawr College and is the Director of Museum Studies at the College. Her work centers on how early museums and anthropology produced persistent visual codes for promoting racial hierarchies and denigrating people of African descent. After receiving her PhD in Physical Anthropology from Yale University in 2004, she worked for more than ten years as head of cultural education at the American Museum of Natural History. Scott’s early work, the basis for her 2007 book Rethinking Evolution in the Museum: Envisioning African Origins, considers representations of Africa in natural history museums. She argues that museum visitors often interpret African origins as linear, color-coded narratives of progress from bestial African prehistory to a civilized, European present, and that the sources of these teleological assumptions derive both from exhibition media and the racial folklore circulating outside the museum.