Deborah Thomas Named Editor-in-Chief of “American Anthropologist”

Deborah Thomas, an anthropology professor in Penn Arts and Sciences, has been named editor-in-chief of the American Anthropological Association’s flagship journal American Anthropologist, effective July 1. The position runs through June 30, 2020.

“I envision American Anthropologist as a platform from which anthropologists are able to enter a broader academic conversation,” said Thomas, who also holds appointments in Penn’s Graduate School of Education and School of Social Policy and Practice and is a core faculty member of the Alice Paul Center for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality.

“I hope that during my time as editor-in-chief, AA continues to foster dialogue and debate across the subfields while supporting the association’s commitment to enhancing diversity in relation to forms of scholarly production and underrepresented groups,” she said.

Thomas’s 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.

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