Geography, Culture, and Race

Professor of Anthropology and Africana Studies, University of Pennsylvania
Moderator, Geography, Culture, and Race

Deborah A. Thomas is Professor of Anthropology 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 is co-editor of the volume Globalization and Race: Transformations in the Cultural Production of Blackness. Thomas also directed and produced the documentary film Bad Friday: Rastafari after Coral Gardens. She is the incoming Editor-in-Chief of American Anthropologist, the flagship journal of the American Anthropological Association.

Select Resources

• Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in Transnational Jamaica [for purchase]

• Modern Blackness: Nationalism, Globalization, and the Politics of Culture in Jamaica

• “The Violence of Diaspora: Governmentality, Class Cultures, and Circulations” in Radical History Review (2009) [pdf]

Classes

• Class 4: Geography, Culture, and Race
• Class 5: Violence and Race

Walter H. and Lenore C. Annenberg Professor in the Social Sciences; Professor of Sociology, Africana Studies & Education; Director, Center for Africana Studies, University of Pennsylvania

Professor Charles’ research interests are in the areas of urban inequality, racial attitudes and intergroup relations, racial residential segregation, minorities in higher education, and racial identity. Her work has appeared in Social Forces, Social Problems, Social Science Research, The DuBois Review, the American Journal of Education, the Annual Review of Sociology, the Chronicle of Higher Education and The Root. Dr. Charles is author of Won’t You Be My Neighbor: Race, Class and Residence in Los Angeles (Russell Sage, Fall 2006), which explores class- and race-based explanations for persisting residential segregation by race. She is also nearing completion of a sole-authored book on Black racial identity in the United States, tentatively titled, The New Black: Race-Conscious or Post-Racial?

Select Resources

• Won't You Be My Neighbor: Race, Class and Residence in Los Angeles [for purchase]

Classes

• Class 4: Geography, Culture, and Race

Professor of Sociology, Education, and Asian American Studies, University of Pennsylvania

Professor Kao’s research focuses on race, ethnic, and immigrant differences in educational outcomes among youth. What accounts for immigrant, racial, and ethnic disparities in educational outcomes? Educational achievement and attainment differences persist for minorities and immigrants in the United States. At what age do these differences first appear? Are the educational differences of minority and immigrant children simply a reflection of their parents’ class status? Her work has used quantitative analyses of nationally-representative data on students and parents to examine these questions. Currently, she is examining determinants of achievement outcomes among elementary school children and focusing on comparing children of immigrant parents to children of native-born parents within racial groups. She is also interested in how the labor migration of parents affects children who are left behind.

Classes

• Class 4: Geography, Culture, and Race

Assistant Professor of History, Penn State; 2016-2018 Barra Postdoctoral Fellow, McNeil Center for Early American Studies, University of Pennsylvania

Christopher Heaney is an Assistant Professor of History at Penn State and a Barra Postdoctoral Fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He studies the history of anthropology, grave-opening, and the collection of the dead in Peru and the Americas. His first book, Cradle of Gold (Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), explored the scientific discovery and excavation of Machu Picchu, and the contest between Peru and Yale University over the contents of its graves. His current project explores the circulation of the ancient Peruvian and Inca dead, from mummies to skulls, in the early and republican Americas, and how they shaped anthropology’s formation as a discipline.

Select Resources

• “A Peru of Their Own: English Grave-Opening and Indian Sovereignty in Early America”

• Cradle of Gold

Classes

• Class 4: Geography, Culture, and Race

Professor, Director of Museum Studies, Bryn Mawr College

Monique Scott is an anthropologist with a career as both a scholar of museums and as a museum professional working within museums. After receiving her PhD in Anthropology from Yale University in 2004, Monique worked for more than ten years as head of cultural education at the American Museum of Natural History. Monique specializes in how diverse museum visitors make meaning of race and culture encoded in museum displays, as well as how diverse audiences experience traditional anthropology and natural history museums as a whole, the basis for her 2007 book Rethinking Evolution in the Museum: Envisioning African Origins. Her recent research focuses on the representation of Africa in contemporary art and anthropology exhibitions—exploring the dense tension between African objects as art and artifact. At Bryn Mawr College, Monique teaches about museums in the History of Art and Anthropology Departments and is building a new interdisciplinary Museum Studies program, a model of engaged liberal arts. Monique is also a Consulting Scholar for the Africa Section at the Penn Museum, a Research Associate in Anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History and is on the African-American Collections Committee at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Select Resources

• Evolution in the Museum: Envisioning African Origins (Routledge 2007) [for purchase]

• Monique Scott on Reframing Anthropology Exhibitions for Contemporary Audiences, Society for Visual Anthropology [video]

Classes

• Class 4: Geography, Culture, and Race