Join the WGSS community for this year's Yulee Lecture by Professors Deborah A. Thomas and Jade Power-Sotomayor.
When: Friday, April 3rd at 4pm
Where: Duques Hall 151
About the Speakers
Deborah A. Thomas is the R. Jean Brownlee Professor of Anthropology, and the Director of the Center for Experimental Ethnography at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Exorbitance: A Speculative Ethnography of Inheritance, Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation, Exceptional Violence, and Modern Blackness. She is also co-director of the documentary films Bad Friday and Four Days in May, and writer and visual editor of the audio-visual prose-poem “Tidalectic Repair,” which will be exhibited at Wrightwood 659 Chicago from April to July 2026. Thomas is the recipient of several awards, including a Guggenheim fellowship, and she is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Prior to her life in the academy, she was a professional dancer with the New York-based Urban Bush Women.
Jade Power-Sotomayor is a Cali-Rican educator, scholar and performer who works as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance at UC San Diego. Her research and writerly interests span across Puerto Rican cultural studies, Latinx/Latine theatre and performance, dance studies, nightlife cultures, epistemologies of the body, land-based performances, feminist of color critique, bilingualism, race and language, and intercultural performance in the Caribbean diaspora. Her writing and publications have been recognized with multiple awards across various professional organizations and her first single-authored book ¡Habla! Speaking Bodies and Dancing Our América is forthcoming from NYU Press. She is also a dramaturg and co-directs and performs with the San Diego-based group Bomba Liberté.
