PEOPLE // FACULTY // FELLOWS // STUDENTS // SCHOLARS
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deborah a. thomas
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.
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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.
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JOHN JACKSON JR.
John L. Jackson, Jr., is the Walter H. Annenberg Dean of the Annenberg School for Communication and Richard Perry University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He was previously Dean of the School of Social Policy & Practice and Special Adviser to the Provost on Diversity at Penn. He is the author of Harlemworld: Doing Race and Class in Contemporary Black America (University of Chicago Press, 2001); Real Black: Adventures in Racial Sincerity (University of Chicago Press, 2005); Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political
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Correctness (Basic Civitas, 2008); Thin Description: Ethnography and the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem (Harvard University Press, 2013); Impolite Conversations: On Race, Politics, Sex, Money, and Religion, co-written with Cora Daniels (Atria/Simon & Schuster, 2014), and Televised Redemption: Black Religious Media and Racial Empowerment (NYU Press, 2016), co-written with Carolyn Rouse and Marla Frederick. He is also editor of Social Policy and Social Justice (2016), distributed by the University of Pennsylvania Press.
His most recent film, co-directed with Deborah A. Thomas, is Bad Friday: Rastafari after Coral Gardens (Third World Newsreel, 2012), and he is currently part of the production team completing Making Sweet Tea: The Lives and Loves of Southern Black Gay Men. An urban researcher, media ethnographer, anthropologist of religion, and theorist of race/ethnicity, Jackson’s work also critically explores how film and other non-traditional or multi-modal formats can be most effectively utilized in specifically scholarly research projects, and he is one of the founding members of CAMRA.
His most recent film, co-directed with Deborah A. Thomas, is Bad Friday: Rastafari after Coral Gardens (Third World Newsreel, 2012), and he is currently part of the production team completing Making Sweet Tea: The Lives and Loves of Southern Black Gay Men. An urban researcher, media ethnographer, anthropologist of religion, and theorist of race/ethnicity, Jackson’s work also critically explores how film and other non-traditional or multi-modal formats can be most effectively utilized in specifically scholarly research projects, and he is one of the founding members of CAMRA.
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Alissa Jordan is affiliated faculty in the Department of Anthropology, in Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies, and in the Graduate School of Education. She is a multimodal cultural and medical anthropologist focusing on healing, embodiment, and reproductive in/justice for Black birthing people in Haiti and the broader global health sphere. Using collaborative ethnographic filmmaking, audio production, illustration, and participatory activism, she explores the alternative worlds that Black women build through attending to their bodies and generating "underground" wisdom outside of, and in relation to, Western epistemes. Her work engages with the way that acts of self-healing and self-love critique the terms and conditions of reproduction under racial capitalism. In 2023, she was recognized with the Platinum Award through the University of Pennsylvania School of Arts and Sciences for extraordinary contributions to the mission of the School.
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She is currently finishing her first book, Atlas of Nanm: Bodily Openings and Encounters in Haiti. It is an ethnography of the embodied wisdom that women generate at sites where their bodies “open” [louvri] to the world. Organizing this wisdom according to the sites of mouths, uteruses, eyes, skin, and dreams, this book is envisioned as a multimedia atlas of life force, known as nanm, as it moves into and out of women’s bodies at these portals. Their lived experiences of care become authoritative sources of insight into the way bodies should interact with one another, and into decisions about whose bodies demand care. Prose and theoretical interludes are interwoven with collaborative illustrations--graphic concoctions compiled from photographs, diagrams, and medicines made by and with interlocutors. The book is under contract with the University of Pennsylvania press.
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ANGELANTONIO GROSSISENIOR FELLOW |
[email protected] |
I work at the intersection of anthropology, religious studies, and media, reflecting on questions of translation, coloniality, and spiritual traditions across multiple locales, including Ghana, the US, and Italy. In my research, I interrogate common delineations of ethnic, linguistic, and geographical boundaries by foregrounding the role of Ghana-based spirit mediums in the mediatization and revaluation of traditions such as Vodu across multi-continental geographies and Afro-diasporic temporalities. In my practice, I have developed a shared approach to ethnography through multimodal engagement with filming and archival work. I am currently working on a book project, tentatively titled "Spirits in Circulation: Digital Media and Indigenous Spirituality in Post-Christian Ghana"
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Gilbert Seldes
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Azsaneé Truss is the Gilbert Seldes Multimodal Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for Experimental Ethnography. She theorizes cultural production as valid forms of knowledge production, researching how Black expressive cultures act as sites of theory and resistance around the globe.
Truss holds a PhD from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Here, her dissertation utilized cultural studies as a framework to research conspiracy theorizing in Black American art and media as a subversive discursive practice. This project explicates the culturally specific logics of these practices, understanding them as a type of vernacular theory grounded in critical understandings of racialized oppression. Through critical multimodal discourse analyses of conspiracy theories in Black art and media, this work seeks to understand how these forms structure alternative, subversive modes of knowledge production.
She has also published and presented work on radical imagination in Black media, dance as a modality for storytelling and knowledge creation across the African diaspora, and how digital technologies shape new modes of expression. As a multimodal scholar, Truss collaborates with fellow artists, scholars, and cultural workers to explore new forms of critical inquiry through visual and performative practices. Her work ultimately aims to expand the possibilities of scholarly expression and the futures we can imagine through it.
Truss holds a PhD from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Here, her dissertation utilized cultural studies as a framework to research conspiracy theorizing in Black American art and media as a subversive discursive practice. This project explicates the culturally specific logics of these practices, understanding them as a type of vernacular theory grounded in critical understandings of racialized oppression. Through critical multimodal discourse analyses of conspiracy theories in Black art and media, this work seeks to understand how these forms structure alternative, subversive modes of knowledge production.
She has also published and presented work on radical imagination in Black media, dance as a modality for storytelling and knowledge creation across the African diaspora, and how digital technologies shape new modes of expression. As a multimodal scholar, Truss collaborates with fellow artists, scholars, and cultural workers to explore new forms of critical inquiry through visual and performative practices. Her work ultimately aims to expand the possibilities of scholarly expression and the futures we can imagine through it.
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Jezenia ROmero
Program Coordinator and Outreach Fellow [email protected]
Jezenia Romero is an artist who works with sound, performance, video and sculpture. Originally from Los Angeles, California, her projects include experimental artist books, various music and performance projects, and an independent music label established in 2015. In addition to her visual art and music practice, Jezenia has also taught workshops in DIY music production, publishing and welding in partnership with the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce, NY. Previous work includes the development and implementation of a Virtual Welding Simulation course at Rikers Island New York. Current works include a book archiving 10 years of cassette tape releases from her music label.
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